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WE AND OUR CHILDREN 



WE AND 
OUR CHILDREN 



BY 
WOODS HUTCHINSON, A. M., M. D. 

ft ' ' 

Author of "Instinct and Health" "Preventable Diseases" 

"The Conquest of Consumption" "Exercise 

and Health," &c, &c. 




Garden City New Yoric 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1911 



RJi©\ 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 

COPYRIGHT, I908, I909, BY SUCCESS COMPANY 
COPYRIGHT, 1908, I9IO, BY CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY 
COPYRIGHT, I9IO, BY PHELPS PUBLISHING COMPANY 
COPYRIGHT, I9II, BY CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 
COPYRIGHT, I9II, BY INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT, igtl, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE k COMPANY 






COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



©CI.A30O804 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGB 

Introduction vii 

I. Before the Little One Comes 3 

II. Babies as Bulbs 10 

III. The Nursery Age 24 

IV. The Sweet Tooth 52 

V. The Kindergarten Age 74 

VI. Feeding the Human Caterpillar 79 

VII. Our Ivory Keepers of the Gate 103 

VIII. The Child's Self-Respect 133 

IX. Brick Walls and the Growing Child 155 

X. Eyes and Ears 186 

XI. The Worship of the Race Stream 210 

XII. Reluctant Parentage 249 

XIII. The American Mother 270 

XIV. The Delicate Child 307 

XV. Fiction as a Diet 339 

XVI. Overworked Children on the Farm and in the School 362 



INTRODUCTION 

THIS world is a nursery, not merely for im- 
mortal souls, but for flesh and blood babies. 
Growth is its business, growth the only 
thing that it insists upon. After we have done our 
own growing, our chief excuse for further existence 
is to make our babies grow. Grown-ups could get 
along in tree-tops and in caves, but for the shelter 
of the child houses had to be invented. There was 
only one room in the primitive house and that was 
the nursery. And the modern one ought to be 
run on the same plan. Cities, on the other hand, 
were made to huddle in for shelter against enemies, 
or to do business in. Now the most urgent demand 
of thoughtful lovers of their kind is that they should 
be made places to grow children in. And the 
community would profit just as much by such 
a change as the children would. Any place which 
is not fit to rear a child in is not fit for a man or a 
woman to live in. 

The more thoughtfully we consider our children 
the more deeply we will benefit ourselves. That 
one phrase, "and a little child shall lead them," 
sums up the millennium. The child not only has 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

a right to the best that is in us, but will bring 
out the best that is in us. The race has made us 
what we are — the child is the embodiment of the 
race, and the debt that we owe to the race we 
pay to him. The highest debt, the most sacred 
obligation that any community owes, is to its chil- 
dren. If business interests must suffer in order 
that the child may be provided with pure food, 
then they must suffer. If the growth of our cities 
will be interfered with by insistence upon play- 
grounds and breathing spaces and well-lighted 
houses and homes, then it must be interfered with. 
No matter what tax upon property is necessary 
to provide schoolhouses and parks and play- 
grounds, and a fair start in life for every child, it 
must bear it. 

After all, these things are but the small dust of 
the balance compared with the child. It was the 
child, in fact, and his care, that started us upward 
from savagery and has kept us from falling back 
into it ever since. Only in educating and training 
and improving its children can the race educate and 
train itself. All honour to old age and to authority, 
but it is the honour paid the child and the mother 
that stamps the rank of a civilization! Not only 
what the race will be in the next generation, but what 
it is in the present, depends upon its treatment of 
its children. Run your house in the interests of 
your children, run your business and see that every- 



INTRODUCTION ix 

body else runs his business in the interests of your 
children. Run your politics and your government 
in the interests of your children, and the world will 
become a Utopia within three generations. No 
sacrifice is too great to make, no sum too large to 
demand, for the proper and intelligent care of chil- 
dren. That class of investments will return fifty 
per cent, every year, good or bad. 

The supreme test of a civilization is the sort of 
men and women it breeds, and the time to influence 
men and women for better or for worse is in child- 
hood. It costs far more to raise and educate a child 

i 

than it used to; but if we are getting a better child 
for our money, it is money well spent. What else 
are we here for? 

And we must spend more than money on our 
children — we must spend ourselves and our time. 
It is not enough simply to provide a good house and 
plenty of food and substantial clothing. 

It is a particularly good thing for a child to have 
two parents, one of each kind. We fathers are too 
apt to echo piously the Hindu proverb: "God could 
not be everywhere, so he made mothers," and con- 
sider that we have done our duty when we have 
provided a place and means for our wives to take 
care of our children. Not only do we regard it as 
a waste of time to take an hour or a half day from 
our Sacred Business and devote it to the personal 
care of our children, but we have even come to feel 



x INTRODUCTION 

that it is undignified, almost unmanly, to play 
nurse maid to our own children in public. 

By common consent we place the defence of our 
country and the call of her needs above all personal 
and financial interests, no matter how weighty 
and grave. We ought equally to recognize our 
duty to the race, as embodied in our children, as 
taking precedence over anything and everything 
else. Of course we work and slave largely that we 
may be able to give certain advantages and a good 
start to our children. But in so doing we may be 
easily robbing them of things far more valuable 
than anything that can be bought with money. 
We should plan our engagements so as to devote 
a part of every day and a day or more out of 
every week to our children as regularly and as 
religiously as we do to our business, our commit- 
tees, or our clubs. If this should involve a com- 
plete recasting and rearranging of our hours of 
work and days of work in the week, so much the 
better. It would profit business and the business 
man, work and the worker, almost as much as it 
would the child. A child has just as much right to 
and need of his father's companionship and help 
and influence as his mother's. 



WE AND OUR CHILDREN 



CHAPTER I 

BEFORE THE LITTLE ONE COMES 

WHEN the new life has begun there follows 
a period of brooding and expectancy 
which is one of the most sacred in the life 
of woman. Superstition and stupidity have done 
their best to fill this time, naturally and normally 
one of the safest and happiest in nature, with 
fears and forebodings, but nowhere is nature more 
absolutely to be trusted. So great is her tenderness 
for the new life that the older life becomes of secon- 
dary importance. Short of absolute starvation, 
serious infectious disease, or severe accident, little 
or nothing that happens to the mother will have 
any serious effect in disturbing the growth of the 
child. The extent to which nature can keep the 
coming life in a watertight compartment, as it were, 
shut off from the rest of the body fluids and tissues, 
is something marvellous. Even in such an extreme 
case as that of a mother in an advanced stage of 
consumption, not only will the child be born in 
surprisingly good condition, but the progress of the 
dread disease in the mother will be temporarily 
arrested — only to rush on, however, with cataract- 

3 



4 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

like headway after birth has occurred. It is a 
commonplace of vital statistics that expectant 
mothers have a distinct and noticeably lower sus- 
ceptibility to the attack of infectious diseases, with 
the single exception perhaps of small pox, than 
have other women in the community of their age 
and class, and that when they are attacked 'they 
resist them exceedingly well, unless violent enough 
to cause the death of the new life. 

Of course with the double strain thrown upon her 
blood-purifying organs comes a slightly greater 
liability to disturbances of the liver and kidneys, 
but this is more than offset by the lessened sus- 
ceptibility to infectious diseases, and in the de- 
cided majority of instances maternity is accom- 
panied by improved nutrition and a lower death 
and disease rate. 

Due probably to this overloading of the blood 
with waste poisons there is in mothers of either 
excitable or depressed nervous temperaments some 
tendency to an exaggeration of these mental states, 
but even this is far less common than is popularly 
supposed. While the bearing of a new life is a grave 
and weighty undertaking, which should be by no 
means entered into lightly and recklessly, invol- 
ving serious, and often distressing, strains upon 
patience and endurance, much suffering, and some 
risk of life, so that every woman who goes through 
it has placed the race under a lasting debt of grat- 



BEFORE THE LITTLE ONE COMES 5 

itude to her, yet so perfectly has nature surrounded 
it with safeguards that the chances are at least 
twenty to one in favour of a happy issue for all 
parties concerned, and the actual mortality of 
married women during the childbearing period is 
no higher than that of spinsters of the same age. 

The only thing necessary for the most anxious and 
conscientious mother to do is to lead a healthy, 
normal, happy life with as little departure as 
possible from her former habits, unless these were 
unwholesome or unsanitary. At no time is it 
more desirable that as much of the day and night 
should be spent in the open air as possible, and 
instead of neglecting her exercise she should be 
most scrupulous to keep all her muscular activities 
at a high level, and maintain that level just as long 
as circumstances will permit. It is well, of course, 
to avoid exercises or sports involving severe physical 
strains, or risk of falls and such injuries, but it is 
far better and safer to err on the side of too much 
open air life and exercise than too little, for it will 
mean a happier and more normal ending, and a 
healthier and more vigorous child. 

Many women seriously impair their health, 
and add to the discomforts and distresses of the 
situation, by shutting themselves up too much in- 
doors and taking little or no exercise. Above all, 
no woman should be for a moment deterred from 
going about with absolute freedom and without 



WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

hesitancy wherever she wishes, and wherever the 
needs of her health, or her family duties, or social 
affairs require, by any fear of possible comment or 
from a false sense of modesty. The growth of a 
new life is far too high and serious and important a 
matter to society and to the race to be interfered 
with for a moment by ridiculous and, indeed, im- 
moral and indecent conventions and trivialities 
of this sort. Motherhood has undisputed right of 
way over anything and everything else in this world, 
and every true man, every true woman, will gladly 
recognize that right wherever exercised. 

As for the popular fears that the child may 
possibly be affected or "marked" in some way 
by anything that the mother may see at this period, 
or any unpleasant impressions which are made upon 
her mind, these are nothing but the purest super- 
stitions and fairy tales, which belong in the same 
mental ash barrel with the Headless Horseman and 
the Hundred League Boots. Of course every Wise 
Woman, every ancient Mother in Israel, can tell 
you of a dozen instances where such portentous 
calamities have happened, but to every one who has 
given them the slightest serious investigation 
they are simply a laughing stock. All the so-called 
marks and imitative deformities are now known 
to be due to natural causes, arrests of develop- 
ment from causes working in the child's own body, 
and having absolutely no connection with anything 



BEFORE THE LITTLE ONE COMES 7 

outside of it. They occur just as frequently in 
the children of women who have never been fright- 
ened or shocked or " impressed" as in those who 
have; and now that we are able to tell with pre- 
cision from our knowledge of prenatal development, 
the month, and even, in many cases, the week in 
which they took place, in every case investigated 
this has been found to be anywhere from three to 
six months before the shock or the fright which is 
alleged to have caused them. In fact we know now 
that ninety per cent, of all these changes occur be- 
fore the end of the third month, while the shocks 
and frights seldom occur before the fifth to the 
eighth. 

Nothing that a woman says or hears, no mental 
or emotional impression that she receives, can affect 
the unborn child in any appreciable way — nothing, 
in fact, that she can experience, except the serious 
physical injuries, starvation, infections or accidents 
which we have already mentioned. Although arrests 
of development, and congenital defects, have at- 
tracted an immense amount of attention on account 
of their strangeness, and of the eager way in which 
rumour and fairy tale have been busy with them, 
yet in point of actual frequency they are among the 
rarest curiosities of medicine, and occur only once 
or twice in a thousand births. 

With the double demand upon her powers of nu- 
trition the appetitie of the mother usually in- 



8 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

creases, and while in nine cases out of ten this 
increase is along perfectly wholesome and health- 
ful lines, occasionally it will take the form of curious 
and somewhat unusual cravings for particular 
articles of food. There is very seldom any dietetic 
harm in any of these whims, in fact in many in- 
stances they tend to fill a gap in the dietary, or 
redress an imperfectly balanced ration, and unless 
they call for something positively injurious it is 
usually best to gratify them. But imagination 
has been busy again with these trifling and rare 
eccentricities and magnified them into factors of 
most baleful influence upon the future of the child. 
This was perhaps natural enough for primitive man, 
who never could understand the mystery of birth 
and consequently surrounded it with an atmos- 
phere of legend and myth, much of which survives 
at the present day. These are, however, as arrant 
fairy tales as were ever crooned over camp fires, or 
are told with bated breath by children round the 
nursery hearth, before the lamps are lit, to-day. 
No maternal cravings, whether gratified or ungrati- 
fied, have the slightest effect upon the child. 

The diet of the mother should be abundant, 
nutritious, varied and well cooked. The greatest, 
I had almost said the only, fault which it can have 
is to be too scanty. There is neither any kind of 
food nor class of food which has any injurious effect 
upon the new life, or is there any other which is 



BEFORE THE LITTLE ONE COMES 9 

peculiarly good for either mother or child. Any- 
abundant diet which will keep the mother in good 
health and comfort will provide well for the new 
life. 

Only one factor should be watched with special 
care, but that only slightly greater than at all other 
times in life, and that is the scrupulous regularity 
and fullest activity of all the processes by which 
waste is eliminated from the body. This will be 
largely insured by the methods already considered 
— an abundant and well varied dietary, and plenty 
of life and exercise in the open air. But it is well 
at this period to see that the diet is even richer than 
usual in fresh fruits and fresh vegetables, and that 
an abundance of liquids — milk, water, lemonade, 
etc., — is taken, and to promote the activity of the 
skin by means of exercise to the point of perspiration 
and by hot baths. The impression occasionally 
met with that any particular form of diet, for in- 
stance, an avoidance of meat, or a large amount of 
fruit acids, assures an easier culmination of 
the process, is a pure delusion. 



CHAPTER II 



BABIES AS BULBS 



WHAT is a baby for if not to be played 
with? Everybody loves a baby, but he 
certainly needs to be protected from his 
friends at times. We have been studying the child 
most industriously and enthusiastically for a decade 
or two, and have discovered that, assiduous and 
sleepless as the care is that he requires at times, 
at certain stages and at frequent intervals what he 
most needs is wholesome neglect. Give him a 
little chance to live his own life; to fulfil his destiny. 
Our earliest attitude toward babies is and always 
has been a singularly mixed one, alternating be- 
tween states of delighted astonishment and absolute 
panic. At one moment we treat them as if they 
were the most amusing playthings, the most in- 
genious dollies in the world. We joggle them, 
tickle them, and booh at them, and interpret their 
signs of astonishment as marks of enjoyment. 
We show off all their little tricks to every admiring 
visitor. We do everything short of taking them to 
pieces to "see how the wheels go wound." At 
other times we are firmly convinced that unless we 



BABIES AS BULBS n 

are strictly "on the job" day and night they will 
stop growing. Unless we keep them properly 
dressed, bandaged and packed, they will grow 
crooked or lop-sided. 

I have sometimes thought, as I have watched 
the unrolling from its clothes-cocoon of a very new 
baby, and marvelled at the layer after layer of 
flannel which had to be peeled off before you could 
get down to the baby at all, that the beliefs of the 
old-fashioned mother about the ability of a baby 
to hold its limbs together and grow them straight 
without assistance must be much the same as the 
view of the small boy upon the function of a cat's 
tail: "Cats have long curly tails which they wrap 
around their feet when they sit down. I no a cat 
that had no tale and it was afraid to sit down in 
public for fear its feet would skatter." I really do 
not know how else the swaddling bands and ridic- 
ulous trailing skirts of the past generation of babies 
could otherwise be accounted for. 

These things, however, have largely now passed 
into history with the head-board of the papoose to 
flatten his forehead, and the back-board of his basket 
to keep his spine straight. But we are still almost 
as worried and as interferingly officious about his 
mind and his faculties as we were formerly about 
his body and limbs. We insist upon startling him 
or waving objects before his eyes to see if he will 
"take notice." We apply a variety of approved 



12 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

tests to see if he has right sense. We anxiously en- 
deavour to get him to " recognize " us ; and are greatly 
distressed if we cannot get him to grin in response 
to our gurgles, clicks and pokings in the ribs. All 
these are not only of no benefit to the unfortunate 
scrap of humanity, but a distinct distraction from 
the important and absorbing business which occu- 
pies him completely — that of growing up. He 
would much prefer to devote himself exclusively 
to this if we would only let him; but we generally 
won't unless he is goaded to manifest his disapproval 
by unmistakable squalls. 

A masterly inactivity is the hardest of all policies 
to pursue. It is far easier to do something right 
away quick, and to repeat the performance every 
ten minutes. It is really hard to believe that 
that tiny bundle of human possibilities which we 
call a baby will ever succeed in growing into a man 
unless we exert ourselves to the utmost during the 
entire process. Active and strenuous assistance from 
us is the only thing that can save him. Yet few 
impressions can be farther from the fact. Nature 
requires us to provide the raw materials of the proc- 
ess, in the shape of food, warmth, and as little 
clothing as possible; but she and the baby will do 
all the working of it into the finished product with 
very little assistance from us. Indeed, what she 
would be most grateful for is a free hand and no 
"butting in" at the wrong time. 



BABIES AS BULBS 13 

The first lesson in regard to his food supply is 
significant and should be taken to heart. As it is 
now well known, he comes into the world "loaded," 
and needs no supply from external sources for the 
first three days. Indeed, he is much better off with- 
out it. He has all he can do to sleep and learn to 
breathe and get accustomed to that new and trouble- 
some influence, light. If we have the self-control 
to refrain from forcing anything into his unwilling 
mouth, excepting an occasional teaspoonful of 
water, we have lost our best chance of starting him 
off as a colicky baby. For the next two or three 
weeks we ought not to expect any more signs of 
intelligence or active interest in anything than from 
a healthy onion. And he won't make much more 
noise than the latter if he is properly handled. 

The idea that babies squall by nature as a matter 
of habit or out of pure "cussedness" is both a delu- 
sion and a base slander on the baby. Not even a 
pig will squeal when he gets enough to eat and at 
sufficiently frequent intervals. And a farmer who 
should hear his cherished hogs squealing in their 
fattening pens would promptly "call down" the 
hired man whose duty it was to feed them. When- 
ever a baby squalls, it is some grown-up's fault. 
He does not want very much at a time, but he does 
like it regularly. And when you have once, by a 
little careful observation, "struck his gait" as to 
amount and frequency — about two ounces every 



i 4 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

two hours is a fair average to begin with — then his 
little life will be one peaceful sequence of eating and 
sleeping, sleeping and eating, but all the time 
growing with as little fuss or disturbance as a tulip 
makes when it is pushing up its green pencil 
through the brown earth. 

Joggling and rocking and jiggling up and down 
as provocatives of slumber are not only unnecessary 
but absurd. No healthy child needs to be quieted 
or put to sleep. If he isn't either quiet or asleep, 
there is something wrong with him. Most pro- 
cedures that we inflict upon unfortunate infants 
to put them to sleep would have anything but a 
soothing effect if applied to us. When a baby does 
go to sleep under some of them, it must be in self- 
defence in order to get them to stop. Certainly 
this would apply to many of the lullabies that are 
inflicted upon the helpless morsels. How would 
we like to be joggled for three quarters of an 
hour steadily just after a heavy dinner? When 
the joggling has produced its natural Atlantic 
Liner effect, this of course leaves a vacancy to be 
filled, then more joggling until another Jonah per- 
formance occurs, and so on literally ad nauseam. 

Remember that the normal state of a healthy 
baby for the first three months is not wakefulness, 
but sleep. The only thing that he thinks it worth 
while to wake up for is the absorption of nutriment; 
and when he has once successfully surrounded this, 



BABIES AS BULBS 15 

he is not going to waste any time in staying awake. 
If, however, he does want to stay awake for a little 
while out of pure good nature and good fellowship, 
by all means let him. He will go to sleep in the 
end just as inevitably as water will run down hill. 
There is no more need for your taking the personal 
responsibility of putting him to sleep than there is 
of seeing that darkness follows sunset. On the 
other hand, when he is once asleep, he should never 
be awakened for anything short of the house being 
on fire. 

It is most important to get him into regular hab- 
its, but it should be his kind of regularity and not 
yours. He is no railroad train that reaches an eat- 
ing station on schedule time, just every two hours. 
They did not know anything about clocks where 
he came from. But he has a natural self-acting 
dinner gong in his little interior which serves his 
purposes excellently and will rise to the potency 
of a fog horn or a fire alarm if you do not pay atten- 
tion to it promptly. His idea of regularity is a 
nicely balanced rhythm of sleeping till he is hungry 
and then feeding till he is sleepy, with a fine dis- 
regard for the hands of the clock and even for the 
difference between day and night. As his fuel box 
is limited in size and the degree of concentration 
of the fuel administered does not vary much, it 
will take him just about so long to burn up each 
charge, so that he will tap the gong at pretty reg- 



i6 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

ular intervals. But there will be nothing machine- 
like about this regularity. If he should awake 
fifteen minutes before the sacred hour, and show by 
unmistakable minor signs that he is ready for busi- 
ness, feed him at once. He should never be allowed 
to go to the length of crying. To cry is a signal 
of distress, and a baby that cries much has been 
unlucky in its parents or its nurse. 

The idea that babies cry to expand their lungs 
or to develop their voices is a nurse's yarn. A 
child that never cries is as healthy and as happy 
as a nation that has no history. If he happens to 
sleep on past the precise hour, do not wake him on 
any account. So long as he sleeps it is a sign that 
he has got plenty of fuel under his boiler and water 
in it, and is growing like a weed. All the growth 
processes and the construction activities of the 
body are most active in sleep. It is the spending 
and the down-breaking processes that are dominant 
when we are awake. We take in food while we are 
awake, but we utilize it chiefly while we are asleep. 
Do not be afraid to give your little human dormouse 
plenty of leeway in regard to his hours of waking. 

Some people seem to have the mechanical, sal- 
vation-depends-upon-it kind of idea of regularity 
of the old lady who was travelling down the Hudson 
Valley. No sooner had she boarded the train than 
she began to show great uneasiness for fear she 
would not know when she got to Poughkeepsie. 



BABIES AS BULBS X7 

She made both the conductor and the brakeman 
promise that they would be sure to tell her when 
she arrived there; and when the time approached, 
kept asking at every other station if this were not 
Poughkeepsie. The conductor promised her sol- 
emnly that he would not let her be carried past. 
But just before they got to Poughkeepsie they had 
to lay off for another train, and then hurry past to 
the next junction to catch up with the schedule, 
with several other complications added. So that 
in the hurry and bustle of the moment he was nearly 
a quarter of a mile past Poughkeepsie before he 
thought of the old lady. So mortified was he at 
the idea of failing in his promise that he actually 
pulled the rope and ordered the train backed up 
again into the station. Then he hurried down the 
aisle and in his politest manner said: "Here we 
are, madam. This is Poughkeepsie. Can I help 
you off with your valise?" "Oh, no! Thank 
you ever so much. I am not going to get off at 
Poughkeepsie. I am not going to get off at all; 
but the doctor told me I was to take a pill when I 
got to Poughkeepsie." 

This kind of punctuality is not necessary with 
the baby. But if he is allowed to follow his own 
sweet will and drink himself to sleep and sleep 
himself awake on his own schedule, he will be so 
regular you will hardly know he is on earth. In- 
deed, I have actually known of a family who lived 



i8 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

next door to a house where a baby was being brought 
up on this vegetable plan, who indignantly refused 
to believe that there was a baby in that house at 
all, as they had never heard even a whimper in the 
daytime, or seen lights in the windows or signs of 
sentry duty in the dead of night. 

Another thing we must learn to appreciate and 
respect in the baby is his attitude toward light. 
This is widely different from ours. Light is one 
of the most stimulating and attractive things in 
the world to us, and the brighter the better. Wit- 
ness the glitter of the Gin Palace and the blaze of 
Coney Island. But to a poor blinking tot of a 
baby it is as dazzling and irritating as it is grateful 
to us. His chief objection to the new world in 
which he finds himself, if he could put it in words, 
would be: "It's so beastly light." He is born 
a cave-man in more senses than one. While the 
rooms which he occupies should get plenty of sun- 
shine, this should never be allowed to fall directly 
into his eyes or full upon his face. He has neither 
pigment in his tender skin nor hair on the top of his 
pink little head to protect him against the light 
rays; and it is little short of "cruelty to animals" 
to lay an unfortunate baby on his back in a trough- 
like perambulator or baby buggy so deep and so 
well padded that he cannot even squirm, load him 
down with clothing and wraps, or even actually 
strap him down, so that he can lift neither hand nor 



BABIES AS BULBS 19 

foot, and then wheel him about for hours with his 
little face turned up to the full glare of the light 
and even the direct rays of the sun. Here is where 
the foundation of many a case of headache, of 
irritable nerves, of fretfulness with its accompany- 
ing indigestion and sleeplessness is laid. Look 
at the faces of these poor little human cocoons and 
you will see, three times out of five, that while 
they are bravely trying to make the best of it and 
accept it good humouredly, their tiny counte- 
nances are wrinkled into one universal frown of 
perplexity and protest. 

By all means get the baby into the open air, day 
and night; but see to it that his eyes are protected 
from the direct glare of the light, either by hood or 
sunshade, or by turning his back to it. 

It is also important to bear in mind this attitude 
toward light in another field, and that is the attract- 
ing of the child's attention. While a baby, after 
the first few weeks, when awake will follow with his 
eyes any bright or rapidly moving object and a 
little later clutch at it with his hands as instinc- 
tively as a troutlet will snap at a fly, yet a very few 
repetitions of this movement are sufficient to tire 
him. A multiplicity of high lights in the picture 
presented to him or rapid movements before his 
face quickly dazzle and confuse him and get on his 
little nerves. He must be regarded as much in 
the position of a man who has been imprisoned in 



20 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

a half underground dungeon for weeks and then 
suddenly brought out into the full glare of the sun- 
light. He literally sees men as trees walking. The 
whole of his surroundings are one dazzling, shifting 
kaleidoscope of colours and lights, and it is only 
by the slowest and most gradual degrees that he 
picks out here a feature and there a detail until 
it becomes an intelligible whole to him. He gets 
three times as many flashes and shocks and stimuli 
from his environment at the best and quietest as 
he is able to make any use of. And to add to this 
confusion by dangling things in front of his eyes 
or inane snappings of fingers or chuckling of "pretty, 
pretty," in order to make him sit up and take notice 
is simply a worse confounding of confusion. 

Let the baby alone until he is ready to take the 
initiative in wanting to play with you, which he 
surely will in his own good time. If adoring rela- 
tives or conscientiously polite visitors wish to admire 
the baby, they must learn to do so while he is 
asleep. It will be far better and easier for all 
parties concerned. The all too prevalent habit 
of trying to get the baby to recognize somebody 
whom he does not and cannot know from the pro- 
verbial hole in the ground — since he is unable as 
yet even to conceive of his existence — or to respond 
in some way to a particular gurgle or tickle under 
the chin is about as irrational as our childish habit 
of digging up seeds every two or three days after 



BABIES AS BULBS 21 

we had planted them, to see if they were grow- 
ing. You need not be a bit afraid but that his 
brain will develop all right even though he takes 
no more notice of you or his surroundings than a 
potato sprout. As your child he is perfectly safe 
to show at least some signs of intelligence sooner or 
later if you will only give him time. 

This is not by any means to hold that babies 
should not be dandled and petted and played with. 
The instinct to do this is one of the dearest of the 
mother-heart, and like all instincts has a sound 
rational basis. When the child is ready to be 
chirped at and tickled and jumped up and down, 
when he himself invites you to a game of play, then 
play and petting are meat and drink to him, and 
what he needs above everything else. No child 
can grow up healthy, natural and human without 
lots of love and affection and admiring regard. 
What babies-in foundlings' homes and hospitals feel 
most of all is the lack of petting and mothering. 
Only those who are bright and winning enough to 
attract attention and to awaken affection in their 
attendants are able to avoid growing up listless 
and colourless and dreary. You cannot possibly 
be too proud or too fond of your baby. But for 
heaven's sake do not kill him with kindness. And 
try to get his point of view. The important thing 
is to make him happy and healthy, not to amuse 
yourself, or gratify your pride of possession and dis- 



22 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

play. When he wants to be quiet, let him be quiet, 
and when he wants to romp and play, play with 
him. It will save nerve fag for both of you. To 
know when to let well enough alone is half the secret 
of success and happiness. 

Of course the baby's bed should be large and 
firm enough for a playground. To bury a helpless 
infant in a boggy trough of a cot, or basket, or baby- 
buggy, where he has hardly room even to squirm, 
and can only lie stiffly on his back with his nose and 
his toes toward the ceiling, like a mummy or a 
stone crusader on a tomb, is little short of cruelty. 
His cot should have a mattress, not a pulpy 
feather bed, soft but firm enough to stay flat, 
and wide enough to allow him to roll about half a 
yard in every direction. He should be frequently 
laid down on his side, and as soon as he is able 
allowed to kick himself over on to either side, or 
even on his face, to sleep. 

His clothing should be loose enough and suffi- 
ciently "divided" — skirts and petticoats are an 
abomination everywhere and most of all on a baby — 
to permit him to kick every limb he's got to any 
point of the compass — and to all four at once if 
he wishes — to shake hands with his feet, or bring 
his toes up in front of his face for investigation. 

If he can't change his position quick enough to 
suit him, help him, and let him sit up whenever he 
shows an ambition in that direction. Rub and 



BABIES AS BULBS 23 

pat his little back occasionally — so long as he 
audibly expresses his approval it's all right, but 
don't throw him over your shoulder like a sack of 
flour, or hang him face downward across your knee 
and beat a drum-call on his back, "to get the wind 
off his stomach.' 

If he has been properly fed and handled there'll 
be no wind there. If he hasn't, it's little use to 
half-joggle, half-hypnotize him into unconsciousness 
by making him dizzy and drowsy. 



CHAPTER III 



THE NURSERY AGE 



THE natural state and tendency of matter 
is not rest, but movement in a right line. 
If it be stationary it is only so held by the 
pull of opposing force. If this be true of what we 
term "dead" matter, how much more so must it 
be of living. That little pink bunch of folded human 
rose leaves which we call a baby, soft and tiny and 
feeble as it seems, is in reality charged to bursting 
with elemental force, and is determined to grow 
as surely and as irresistibly as the planet whirls in 
its orbit. All we have to do is to provide the sim- 
ple necessary surroundings and nature will do the 
rest. Even babies do not die of themselves, but 
from definite cause, preventable nine times out of 
ten. If the triumphant swing of their tiny life 
impulse be brought to a standstill this is not by 
failure from within but by interference or by 
resistance from without, which it is our business 
and usually within our power to prevent. Some 
of this prevention must begin, in Oliver Wendell 
Holmes's witty phrase, "with the grandparents," 
or at least with the parents. 

24 



THE NURSERY AGE 25 

We hear much of the inalienable rights of man, 
but too little of the rights of the child. Chief and 
most fundamental of all is the right to be well 
born. From a biological point of view one of the 
greatest if not the greatest of all crimes is to bring 
into the world, or permit to be brought into the 
world, a child underfed, diseased, defective, handi- 
capped in any way for life. No act which prevents 
this will stand as a crime ultimately in the con- 
science of the race, no matter what church or state 
may say with their purblind intelligence and anti- 
quated morals. We hear much from pulpit and 
bench alike of the sin of failing to produce our kind, 
but too little of its alternative, the sin of bringing 
into the world children who are physically, mentally, 
or morally crippled from birth, an offence not less 
against the child than the community and which 
must be shouldered as a counterbalance by the 
upholders of "until death do us part," or the denoun- 
cers of attempts to control fertility. Two thirds 
our failures in every class of life, of our paupers 
and our criminals, are the offspring of parents who 
ought never to have been permitted to marry at 
all, or divorced as soon as one found the other out! 

Fortunately the birthright of good breeding, the 
proud privilege of being well born, is, like most 
things worth having, fairly common. Even with 
the lamentable carelessness, not to say recklessness, 
displayed by children in choosing their parents, nine 



26 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

tenths, yes, ninety-five per cent., of them are born 
with all the possibilities of full manhood and true 
womanhood, of the greatest things and highest ac- 
complishments ever yet invented wrapped up in the 
heart of their little body buds. There is scarcely 
a limit to the shipwreck which our own folly of per- 
versity may work upon our own bodies, but when 
it comes to passing on these masterpieces of dis- 
aster to our children, Nature puts her foot down 
like a thousand-ton granite bowlder. Our bodies, 
with what we are pleased to term our minds, 
are simply appendages, creatures of a little island of 
brood-stuff embedded in the midst of them, which, 
though the myriads of successive bodies which 
sheltered it have died and returned to dust, has 
itself been alive and triumphant, untouched by 
decay, undimmed by time, since the dawn of the 
world. We inherit an entailed estate which we 
pass on to our children as we have received it from 
our fathers. We have only the spending of the 
interest, and only by most fiendish ingenuity can 
impair the principal. The torch of life which we 
hand on is the same which has been passed down to 
us from hand to hand through all the ages. Its 
light it is which flickers in the eye and glows in 
the cheek of the baby in its cradle. Nature has 
been planning for ten million years to make your 
baby a success; nobody can prevent her except 
yourself 



THE NURSERY AGE 27 

The best policy in baby raising is one of a sleep- 
less and masterly inactivity. The first, last and 
always most important thing to be done is to 
watch the baby, the second is to watch the baby, 
and the third is to watch the baby. Remember, 
instead of being younger, he is twenty to thirty 
years older than you are, for you have both been 
alive since the dawn of time and the wisdom of 
Nature was not exhausted when you were born. 

When it first appears in the light of day, the tip 
of the sprout of our tiny human plantlet, euphe- 
mistically termed its face, is neither affable in its 
expression nor (if I am assured of police protection) 
attractive. In fact, if he were twenty years older we 
should say he had "a grouch" and wanted nothing 
so much as to be let alone. His evident and absorb- 
ing desire is to shut his eyes, open his mouth and 
take what Nature sends him, and then go to sleep 
again till next time. For heaven's sake let him! 
If a baby's eyes come open oftener than his mouth 
does in the first week of his existence, it is a bad 
sign. He is geared to sleep twenty-three hours out 
of the twenty-four and to grow every minute that 
he sleeps. Why should he waste any time staying 
awake, even to have you decide the absorbing 
question as to just what colour his eyes are, or how 
many fingers and toes he has, or whether he looks 
most like his father or his mother; especially as 
the eyes of all new babies are, like those of puppies 



28 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and kittens, exactly the same colour — that of 
a slate pencil. By a perpetual miracle which 
never loses its wondrousness, they have exactly 
ten fingers and a like number of toes, whether they 
are ever counted or not. And — if their mothers 
are safely out of hearing — they all look exactly 
alike; and their adorable little crumple of features 
resembles no other living human being except them- 
selves, or any other baby born the same day. They 
may be just as eager for the centre of the limelight 
as anybody in forty years' time, but all they want 
now is shade and moisture and warmth, and lots 
of them. 

For the first three weeks of his existence he does 
not know that he has anything but a mouth, and 
nobody else should either. All openings of that 
rosy portal should be exclusively for that which 
entereth into, not that which proceedeth forth 
from, it. A healthy baby his first half month should 
scarcely make much more noise than a potato and 
should be treated like one, planted in a warm sunny 
spot, watered well, and disturbed as little as possible. 
When he wants anything he will wake up and men- 
tion it, but only just loud enough for you to notice 
it, unless you are inattentive enough to require 
him to repeat his remark. Then you will think 
that you have got in the track of an ambulance; 
but this will seldom happen if you are politely 
attentive to his first suggestion. A baby never 



THE NURSERY AGE 29 

cries just to expand his lungs, or to hear himself 
talk. These little weaknesses are of much later 
growth in the age of oratory and voice culture. 

The first danger signal in the nursery is wake- 
fulness, especially if combined with restlessness; 
and the second is noise. It is as bad a sign for a 
baby under a month old to be awake much of the 
daytime as it is for a grown-up to be awake much of 
the night. We hardly realize how closely and 
inseparably connected sleep and growth are. We 
work while we are awake, but we grow while we 
are asleep. We earn our money in the daytime, but 
spend it at night in infancy — as sometimes in 
adult life. When we are doubling our weight every 
eight months in babyhood we sleep eighteen to 
twenty hours a day. As long as we can sleep ten 
or more hours a day we continue to grow. When 
we reach the dead line of nine hours our growth 
stops; and when we fall to eight, seven or six, each 
hour marks a step on our descent into the valley 
of the shadow. A baby is the visible embodiment 
of "rosy sleep, " and anything that murders sleep 
is death to him. But don't imagine that because 
he sleeps so much he does not need much to eat. 
He sleeps so that he can devote his undisturbed 
attention to the business of growth, and such a 
success does he make of his business that he grows 
five times as fast as he ever will again, and requires 
three times as much food in porportion to his body 



3 o WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

weight as you do, or nearly one fourth as much as 
a full grown man. Almost the only thing that will 
make him wakeful or noisy is hunger, either because 
he does not get enough food, or because what he 
gets is not digestible. 

This huge food intake and body building that he 
is doing with it mean two other things which it is 
most important to remember — that like an engine 
at full speed he is giving off a huge amount of heat 
and requires an abundant supply of air for draught 
purposes. Why should we be so anxious to keep 
the baby warm and so fearful that he will get chilled 
when he is manufacturing nearly twice as much 
heat in proportion to his weight as we ate? The 
explanation is simple: He has so much more 
surface in proportion to his bulk, he is literally like 
Miles Standish — 

A little chimney 
Heated hot in a minute 

and as quickly cooled. The way to keep a baby 
warm, then, is not to overheat the room, but to 
keep his body well covered. Only do that and you 
will find him a perfect little furnace. But, like 
any other furnace, if he is going to keep up a hot 
fire he must have an open draught, so whatever 
you do don't cover his face or you will "chill" 
him, precisely as you would a stove by shutting 
the draught and turning down the damper. 



THE NURSERY AGE 31 

There is absolutely no danger of a baby's "catch- 
ing cold" by the exposure of its face or through its 
nose unless the air that it has to breath contains 
germs, or gases, or dust. Babies are exceedingly 
sensitive to foul or overheated air, not in the least 
so to cool, fresh air. Keep the nursery windows 
open toward Jerusalem or any other place, day and 
night, and if by so doing you make the room too 
cool to be comfortable for the old nurse and the 
neighbourhood busybody, so much the better! 
You cannot give a baby too much fresh air; if he 
has plenty of fuel under his boilers he will turn 
half of it into heat. After the first two weeks his 
daytime sleeps should be taken in the open air in 
some sheltered, sunny spot so long as the tempera- 
ture is above freezing. The open air treatment is 
now relied upon for sick babies more than any other 
one thing except pure milk. 

Not only are tiny, shrivelled, hollow-eyed mortals 
with summer diarrhoea taken right out under the 
trees if possible and kept there day and night, but 
even wheezing little gaspers in the last struggle with 
pneumonia and bronchitis are carried right out, cots 
and all, on to the roofs of the hospitals, even where 
the snow has to be swept out of the way and banked 
up on both sides of them — not to "catch their 
death of cold," but to recover after they have been 
given up to die in the wards below. Babies are 
little clouds of water gas shot through and through 



32 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

with sunlight and whizzing with the pulse of the 
southwest wind; they revel in the sunshine and 
dance with the wind, and fade and die if they are 
cut off from either. Yet we bury them in deep 
coffin-like cradles, imprison them in air-tight, over- 
heated rooms poisoned by our breaths, and when 
we at last venture to let them take the air in half 
hourly doses, when they should be getting it twenty- 
five hours out of the twenty-four, we wrap and 
swaddle and swathe them as if they were Egyp- 
tian mummies. Time and again when I have seen 
babies brought into the clinic or consulting room, 
and have watched the process of unrolling and 
peeling off of the cocoon-like wrappings, I have 
wondered when we were going to come down to the 
real baby and marvelled at the powers of infant 
endurance. If we were to be swathed and wrapped 
so that we could scarcely move hand or foot, and 
then either gripped with arms of steel immovable 
against the ribs of some fifteen hundred pound 
giantess, or dropped into a deep trough lined with 
stifling padding, and covered with a lid made of 
two mattresses, one feather bed and an eiderdown 
quilt, for all the world like a blackbird in a pie, 
we would think we were buried alive and fight for 
dear life to get out of it. That's what the baby 
would like to do, but he can't — poor little beggar! 
And it is even worse for the baby than it would 
be for us, because a baby is like a frog, not only 



THE NURSERY AGE 33 

that it was hatched under water but that he breathes 
with every inch of his skin all over the body. It 
is wrong to cover any part of a baby's body so that 
it has not merely plenty of room to move but 
plenty of air to breathe, and it is little short of 
a crime to cover a baby's face under any circum- 
stances short of zero. Veils and face wraps of all 
sorts are an abomination, a relic of barbarism and a 
mark of superstition in infancy — as well as in 
later life. 

All bandages, stomach protectors, indeed gar- 
ments that touch the body anywhere except loosely 
at the neck and wrists, should be prohibited in 
babyhood. It really is not necessary to wrap a 
baby up tightly for fear he will fall to pieces. Dur- 
ing the first few weeks, loose little slips about six 
inches longer than he is and of the lightest and soft- 
est materials, no matter what, are what he needs. 
The flannel-next-to-the-skin delusion, thank heaven, 
is melting away after having produced more eczema 
and prickly heat and general disturbance of the 
skin in the luckless baby than any other thing 
in the garment line ever invented since the hair 
shirts of the hermits. As soon as he begins to out- 
grow this garment and kick his little pink toes out 
beyond it, split the lower third of it and put feet 
on each leg. Make them both as long and as loose 
as possible just so as to avoid the likelihood of 
his getting both legs into one of them. Two of 



34 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

these of light soft material are better than one of 
heavier, and with a waist cloth should constitute 
his entire fatigue uniform. For dress parade pur- 
poses may be added any number and variety of 
short cotton, linen or silk frocks of whatever 
degree of flimsiness and lace trimmings may most 
appeal to the maternal pride. 

When asleep at any temperature above 50 de- 
grees one light, soft, fleecy blanket and one light 
coverlet made of cheesecloth filled with three or 
four sheets of surgeon's cotton — not the ordinary 
cotton batting of the shops — - will be abundant 
for cover, with an additional coverlet in case 
of a cold night or wind. A baby should of course 
have his own bed with a soft but firm and springy 
mattress, firm enough to remain level under his 
weight and wide enough and long enough so as to 
give him at least a foot, and better still eighteen 
inches, of leeway in every direction to travel over 
in his little wriggling movements. It may be 
enclosed by a railing to prevent these excursions 
from going too far, so as to end in a bump. But 
the bars of this should be only just close enough 
together to prevent his thrusting his head through 
and falling out. 

For the first few days he has not got accus- 
tomed to this dreadfully light new world that he 
has come into, and should be allowed to keep in 
the shade most of the time, but always in a \ve\] 



THE NURSERY AGE 35 

lighted, well sunned room. No air can be kept 
pure and fit for human beings unless it is exposed 
to sunlight frequently. As the shrewd old Italian 
proverb has it: "Where the sunlight never comes 
the doctor often does." After exposure to the light 
of day has coloured his eyes and developed the pro- 
tective pigment in his little skin he can then be 
brought more and more into the sunshine, until 
finally by about the fifth or sixth week he should be 
out in it for several hours every day, always of 
course remembering most carefully to see that his 
eyes and face are protected by a sunshade, or per- 
ambulator top, from the direct glare of the sun. 
After he is about five weeks old, in addition to 
being taken outdoors at least twice a day, he should 
be lifted out of his cot, stripped to his pajamas and 
laid on a mattress or a bed or on top of a table in 
the sunlight in front of a window and allowed to 
kick and wriggle and play with his toes, and bang 
himself in the nose with his fists to his heart's 
content. A little later he should be stripped to 
the "buff" and put through this sun dance at least 
twice a day — the room of course being kept com- 
fortably warm if the weather be cold; or in summer- 
time the window can be opened or, better still, the 
mattress be laid out of doors under a tree. Re- 
member it is not necessary to pile clothing or covers 
upon a baby to keep the cold out. All that is 
needed is one or two, or at most three, layers to 



36 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

keep the heat in, which if he is healthy and fed he is 
pouring out like a young blast-furnace. 

Now as to the fuel for our little human auto just 
starting out on his long-distance endurance run 
through life. Babies are like fledglings in the 
nest. The first thing they know how to do is to 
open their mouths, and though they do not show it 
so plainly, they are as nearly "all mouth" as the 
feathered nestlings. Like the nestlings also, no 
matter what their parents may eat in the way of 
seeds or grains, bread, butter or potatoes, they are 
born of the primitive type, carnivorous, and want 
nothing but meat, living flesh — white and liquid 
in this case instead of red and solid, but meat 
nevertheless and alive. Starch is about as much 
use to a new-born baby as finely ground sawdust, 
for he can digest less than one per cent, of it. 

Now where is he to get such a supply of white, 
liquid protein, still warm and living? Old Mother 
Nature smiles a tired smile and says: "Why I 
invented a supply of that sort of material two 
million years ago and it is still thirty times better 
than anything else since invented to take its place." 
And Nature, as usual, is absolutely right. The 
baby knows what it wants, the mother knows 
what to give it and has known ever since she was 
a creodont or Titanothere in the Jurassic. How 
overwhelmingly sound both their instincts are may 
be vividly glimpsed in the cold and gruesome 



THE NURSERY AGE 37 

fact of modern statistics that the death rate 
in children under one year of age is from ten 
to forty-five times as great among bottle-fed children 
as among breast-fed. 

We have become so accustomed to the idea of 
the bottle as a part of the regular furniture of the 
nursery that it comes with something of a shock 
to us to realize what a broken reed and source of 
positive danger it is. Here are the plain brutal 
facts: In spite of the lightly and even cheerfully 
accepted delusion that the milk gland is dwindling 
to disappearance under civilization, or the bottle 
taking its place, from sixty-five to seventy-five 
per cent, of all children in all civilized communities 
are still breast-fed. Two thirds is the conser- 
vative estimate — three fourths nearer the truth. 
Yet the appalling death rate which occurs during 
the first year of life, the much discussed infant 
mortality, which averages from fifteen to twenty 
per cent., counts three fourths of its victims 
from the bottle-fed one third. In other words, 
the death rate in bottle-fed children the world over 
is, on the face of it, three times as great as that 
in breast-fed. But even this comparison is too 
favourable to the bottle-fed and is due to the fact 
that a larger percentage of bottle-fed children is 
found in the comfortable and well-to-do classes 
who have corresponding advantages in the way of 
abundance and purity of food, sanitary surroundings, 



38 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

intelligent nursing and medical care. When the 
contrast is made between bottle-fed and breast-fed 
children of the same social or economic class, then 
the danger looms up in its true proportions. In 
the parish of St. Pancras of the 779 children under 
one year of age dying in 1905, the proportion of 
the breast-fed dying was 24 per thousand: of the 
hand-fed 98 per thousand, nearly four times as 
great. Doctor Robertson found in Birmingham 
over thirty times as many hand-fed babies died 
as breast-fed. In Huddersfleld it is stated that, 
before the age of three months, fifteen hand-fed 
babies die as compared with one breast-fed. In 
Brighton, Doctor Newsholme, now chief medical 
adviser of the English government, found that 
of babies dying from diarrhoea only six and a 
half per cent, were breast-fed, while eighty per 
cent, were hand-fed. Other observers report 
exactly the same findings, and our American in- 
fant death rates corroborate these figures save that 
the proportions are not quite so great. 

There is abundant statistical basis for the state- 
ment that the baby who can be breast-fed has 
ten times the chances of survival that he would if 
he were bottle-fed. It is a most serious respon- 
sibility to refuse to nurse a child when even the 
barest possibility of ability to do so exists. 

Observers from all over the civilized world 
testify to the gratifying fact that in the working 



THE NURSERY AGE 39 

classes as a whole, except those in which the mothers 
themselves are employed in industrial occupation, 
and in the rural and small town population gen- 
erally, from fifty to ninety per cent, of all children 
are still nourished by Nature's method, the general 
average being about sixty-five per cent. The 
lowest percentage is to be found in two social ex- 
tremes, the very rich, where the mothers are pre- 
vented by the pressure of their social duties from 
attending to such vulgar and insignificant details 
as the feeding of their own children, and the very 
poor, where even the mother's wage is needed to 
keep body and soul together and she has neither the 
time to nurse her baby nor the food that will make 
her milk of any value to it if she should. In both of 
these unfortunate classes, the percentage of breast- 
fed children may fall as low as fifteen or twenty per 
cent., but it is only in the latter one that the death 
rate rises in proportion. A high infant mortality 
is one of the many "blessednesses" of the poor. 

It might at first sight be supposed that much if 
not all of this decline of natural nutritive power 
was involuntary and due to inability. But again 
the figures refute our fears of degeneracy. This 
question, as becomes its vital importance, has now 
been taken up by investigators in all parts of the 
civilized world and in all classes of society with 
astonishing but most uniform conclusions — viz., 
that between ninety and ninety-five per cent, of 



4o WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

►all human mothers are still abundantly able to 
nurse their own children if they are willing and if 
they have the time and the proper feeding to enable 
them to do so. From Berlin, from Dresden, from 
Florence, from Paris, from London and Liverpool, 
from New York and Boston come the cheering 
returns that in no case has it been found that more 
than ten per cent, of the mothers in any class of 
society are unable to nurse their children, and sel- 
dom more than five per cent. Not only so, but 
since within the past five or six years the vital im- 
portance of this proceeding has been recognized, 
physicians at maternity hospitals and at children's 
clinics all over the world are reporting that, where- 
as ten years ago only forty, fifty or sixty per cent, 
of the mothers under their control nursed their 
children, now seventy, eighty and ninety per cent, 
do so habitually, with a corresponding reduction 
of the death rate and sickness rate in the children. 
The returns are just as favourable from physicians 
whose practice is among the wealthiest classes in 
London, Berlin and New York as it is from those 
in dispensaries and clinics. 

The only reason why the modern mother does 
not nourish her own child is that for various reasons 
she finds it inconvenient to do so, and not because 
she has lost the power. First and foremost among 
these reasons for disinclination is the lamentable 
delusion that babies can be raised just as well on 



THE NURSERY AGE 41 

cow's milk or some modification of it. When this 
false premise has once been accepted then any 
trifling matter of convenience, of indisposition, of 
pressure of other engagments, of aesthetic consid- 
erations will suffice. A singular sense of false 
modesty often exists in otherwise intelligent and 
most devoted mothers that the carrying out of the 
function is something to be ashamed of, something 
that they do not like the public, or even their inti- 
mate friends to suspect that they indulge in, some- 
thing that, as they frankly express it, "makes them 
feel like animals. " The modern mother is just as 
devoted to her baby and not only would, but does, 
sacrifice herself for it with as little hesitation as 
the mother of any age, but, believing that the baby 
is just as well off on cow's milk, she ha3 allowed 
minor and often trivial considerations to divert her 
from the discharge of her most important duty. 

This is hardly to be wondered at, for to most of 
us milk is milk just as "eggs is eggs." Indeed, it 
is only since our laboratories have begun their 
most careful analytical study of cow's milk that 
we have begun to realize its enormous differences 
from real baby's food. It ought to have been 
sufficient to remember that one milk has been fitted 
for hundreds of thousands of years to grow a calf, 
the other to grow a baby. That, for instance, while 
the human baby grows about fifty per cent, bigger 
during the first six months of his little life, the 



42 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

bovine baby grows nearly five hundred per cent, in 
the same time. Nature would be a fool if she pro- 
vided the same kind of food for both. As a matter 
of fact, as we should have expected, the two milks 
vary nearly one hundred per cent, in every respect, 
except the fat. It is of course impossible to enter 
into the details, but fortunately it is not necessary. 
It may be roughly summed up in two statements: 
First, that the protein or "meat" of cow's milk 
is double that of human milk and the proportion of 
it which is in the form of tough, indigestible casein 
(literally " cheesAn, " from the Latin word of that 
meaning) is nearly six times as great. This is why 
it makes such a tough, hard, indigestible curd in 
the unfortunate baby's stomach, which is not in 
the least fitted to digest it. No amount of dilution 
or modification will overcome this radical defect. 
Incidentally ; the sugar in cow's milk is only half 
the required amount for a baby, so that in pro- 
portion as you get the protein right by diluting, you 
g.et the sugar wrong, but this can be remedied by 
adding milk-sugar. 

The other general statement is more fundamental 
yet — that every single ingredient of the cow's 
milk is wrong for the baby's stomach; its protein 
is bovine protein, its fat is bovine fat, more like 
suet than the delicate human fat required; its salts 
are of the kind and in the proportions required for 
a calf instead of a baby. What the delicate stomach 



THE NURSERY AGE 43 

<f the baby needs and is "geared" for is human 
p-otein, human fat and humanized sugar and salts. 
1 can hardly be over-stated how vitally important 
ii is, not merely for the baby's survival, but for his 
fiture vigour and growth that he should obtain 
diring the first three or four weeks of his life a 
hunanized supply of food. Even if it is only pos- 
sible, for physical reasons, for him to receive one 
hif, or one third, or one fifth of his nourishment 
in this form, it is worth every effort made to obtain 
it After he has reached the fourth week he becomes 
Cipable of tackling the tough curd of cow's milk with 
omparative ease and this can be made an increasing 
eement in his diet if circumstances demand it. 

But the feeling of thoughtful pediatrists, or special- 
ists in children's diseases, is coming more and more 
t) the view that the very perfection of our methods 
for modifying cow's milk and controlling its purity 
have now become a source of danger in that they 
lead us to think that we may neglect breast feeding 
vith impunity. The best and most successful "milk 
depots" in England and in Europe are devoting 
themselves more and more exclusively to the 
encouragement and promotion of breast feeding 
and are finding, not only that the babies are thriv- 
ing much better but that it actually costs less to 
feed the mother than it does to feed the child di- 
rectly. The best milk depot nowadays is the one 
that uses the least cow's milk, and as Doctor Sykes 



44 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

puts it: "The best way to humanize cow's mik 
is to pass it through the body of the mother." 

If this be our attitude toward even the m<st 
carefully modified cow's milk, what shall we sayof 
its commercial substitutes and parodies, infart's 
foods? — that the majority of them are little beter 
than sanitary nuisances, and that I hope to see he 
day when their manufacture, advertisement and ale 
will be prohibited by law. The sole virtues of rrost 
of them are that they seem cheap, are convenient 
to handle and save trouble for the indifferent nirse 
and careless doctor. They are excellent things in 
their place, but their place is on the shelf in ihe 
drug store, not in the nursery. The only exceptbn 
is some of the pre-digested foods, which may )e 
temporarily used to tide a weakly baby over a 
strain. But even here it is much better to get 
cow's milk and peptonize it yourself. They are noae 
of them the equal of good, properly modified cow's 
milk, either in nutritive value or in digestibility, 
with the partial exception of the pre-digested fonr.s. 

Those that are prepared from milk and repre- 
sent something even approaching to real foods for 
a baby are from five to twenty times as expensive 
as milk in porportion to their nutritive value, with 
no counterbalancing advantages except being easy 
to prepare. Those which do not represent milk, 
and they are the vast majority, owe such virtues as 
they may possess; the milk with which they are 



THE NURSERY AGE 45 

mixed, and the mixture when made, is inferior to 
plain milk, on account of the excess of sugar or 
starch. The majority of them, in order to increase 
the profits of their sale, contain large quantities of 
starch, indeed some of them consist chiefly of this 
interesting food, which, though good food for an 
adult is almost useless as a food for a baby under 
six or even nine months of age. Careful analysis 
have shown that a baby up to three months of age 
can utilize in its food not more than half of one per 
cent, of starch, and that anything above this amount 
is injurious, as a baby's saliva and intestinal juices 
contain little or no starchy digest ferments until 
after this age. Yet many of the best known and 
most extensively advertised of these foods contain 
from seventy five to eighty-two per cent, of starch. 

Finally they are all killed foods, killed in the proc- 
ess of drying, baking, sterilizing and preparing, 
while the baby needs its food alive; and as a prac- 
tical consequence it has been found these ten years 
past that babies fed exclusively and even too largely 
for long periods on any of them develop scurvy 
or rickets. The bottle is a danger signal in the 
nursery, but the can of infant's food is a "hoodoo" 
— a far surer sign of scurvy, if not of death, in 
the family within a year than a black cat or a 
broken mirror. 

If the human budlet is given plenty of sunlight 
and fresh air and sound food he will grow as irresist- 



46 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

iblyas the cherry sapling lifted the millstone through 
whose central hole it sprouted out. A most important 
danger signal is failure or arrest of this growth. 
Every baby should be weighed at least once a week 
during his first six months, and once or twice a 
month for the next three years. Nothing will 
furnish better proof of the vigour of his health and 
the adequacy of the care that he is getting. Roughly 
speaking, he should gain about a pound a month 
during his first year (fourteen pounds) ; during his 
second year a little more than half a pound per 
month (eight pounds). It may simplify matters 
to remember that his growth in length or height 
should be half as many inches as his weight in 
pounds, viz., about half an inch a month during 
first year; a little over a quarter of an inch a 
month during his second, and about two inches a 
year after that. If your baby is elongating and 
increasing in specific gravity at about this rate 
or indeed, under ordinary circumstances, within 
twenty per cent, of it either above or below, as he 
will usually be doing eight times out of ten, you 
may set your mind at rest about his future. 

Other indications of growth and healthy develop- 
ment are not quite so easy to determine and keep 
track of. The main difficulty is that we do not 
properly realize how "far back," so to speak, our 
babies are born. For instance, because we can see 
their tiny little pink sea-shells of ears we are sure 



THE NURSERY AGE 4 ? 

that they ought to hear from the day that they are 
born, forgetting that for the first three or ten days 
after birth the average baby is practically deaf 
and pays no attention whatever to sounds except 
they may be loud or rumbling enough to jar his. 
little body or head. As a general thing it is of 
little use to whistle or snap your fingers to attract 
a baby's attention until he is nearly three or four 
months old, though he will notice loud and disturb- 
ing noises as early as his fourth week. 

Similarly because the midget's eyes are open 
the very first time that we see him we are quite 
sure that he can see from birth. As a matter of 
fact all that he has is the vaguest perception of light, 
and that light must vary in intensity or be in rapid 
movement before he can recognize it at all, up to 
about two or three weeks of age. At about four 
weeks he should, normally, begin to follow objects 
with his eyes, but many perfectly healthy infants 
pay little or no attention to even moving objects 
unless they be bright coloured or vividly illumin- 
ated, until four or five months of age. As for the 
idea that your precious offspring can recognize 
you, still less read the extraordinary contortions 
of your countenance when you make faces at him 
short of four or five months — why, he doesn't 
even recognize you as a feature in the landscape 
and couldn't tell you from a red tablecloth or a 
bed post to save his life. He has absolutely no 



48 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

notion of the outlines of objects or even of objects 
as such until, about the age of from three to five 
months, he begins to reach out his little front paw 
and clutch the shiny or vividly coloured clouds 
that are floating round him. 

A baby should be able to hold up his head at 
four months and to sit up unsupported at nine, 
but there is no reason to fear for either his intellect 
or his bodily vigour if these triumphal feats be 
delayed until six and twelve months respectively. 
Only one thing is really significant in the first few 
weeks of life and that is feeble or absent hand grasp. 
The normal child should be able to grasp firmly — 
clutch is the better word — a finger, pencil or other 
object of suitable shape rubbed across his tiny palm 
within the first ten days. Indeed, as is well known, 
babies are born literally where the old "Rock-a-Bye 
Cradle" swings, in the treetops, as they can not 
only clutch like little forceps, but swing supported 
by their hands three to five times as long as a healthy 
adult man can without training. 

Another danger signal is backwardness in learn- 
ing to walk, or, as it should be expressed, back- 
wardness in growing to walk. This triumphant art 
of navigation should be mastered by about twelve 
months of age, but practically it varies over wide 
limits. Some children start darting about like 
little water bugs at ten months, while others, 
through perfectly healthy and vigorous, may stol- 



THE NURSERY AGE 49 

idly content themselves with slower methods of 
the wriggle and crawl until fifteen, sixteen, or 
eighteen months, then, within a week, be running 
all over the house. In any case it is a matter of 
growth, not training, and nothing that can be done 
in the way of teaching or helping the child to walk 
will expedite matters in more than the slightest 
degree, and the more such interference is the greater 
the danger there is to do the child harm in the 
direction of bow-leggedness or weak knees. 

Your baby grew from a tiny little droplet of 
animal jelly, first into the shape of a worm; then in 
the shape of a fish with gills and fin-like buds in- 
stead of arms and legs; then he became a mammal 
with a well marked tail; he was born a quadruped 
and in due process of time he will as inevitably 
become a biped, a speaking and a tool-using creature. 
All he needs is proper surroundings in the shape 
of air and food, and the privilege of your intelligent 
companionship, so that he can do a little imitating. 
Given these he will arrive, as the French say, at the 
full stature and powers of manhood as inevitably as 
the sun rises and sets, unless prevented by death 
or by crippling disease. 

One other dread in the nursery might be men- 
tioned, fortunately a rare one, but whose possibility 
is much worried over by anxious mothers, and that is 
convulsions. As compared with adults, convulsions 
occur more easily in children because their little 



50 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

powers of expressing irritation or removing its cause 
have not been fully developed and the energy 
which, in a grown-up would be used for swearing 
or fighting, "explodes" in this aimless outburst of 
muscular twitching. They do not occur in more 
than a small percentage of children and when they 
do occur are rather significant. Far the commonest 
cause of them is some fever or other infection of 
which they are the first striking symptom. Scarlet 
fever, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, diar- 
rhoea, cholera infantum, bronchitis, or pneumonia 
may all be ushered in by convulsions. It was long 
believed that convulsions came from the stomach 
and that taking excessive amounts, or indigestible 
articles of food would give rise to a convulsion. 
This belief, however, did not stand the test of in- 
vestigation, but was probably due to the fact that 
the commonest source of infection in the infant is 
through food. These convulsions of digestive origin 
are really due to germs or their toxins which have 
been taken in the food and, in fact, often the first 
warnings of a sharp attack of infantile diarrhoea, 
which is an infectious disease nine times out of ten. 
Diseases which are ushered in by convulsions 
are apt to be of a very severe and fatal type, hence 
the impression which has grown up that convulsions 
in children are apt to be fatal. As a matter of 
fact only a small percentage are fatal, and even in 
these the death is due to the disease of which the 



THE NURSERY AGE 51 

convulsion was only a symptom. Another per- 
centage of convulsions, a small one, is due to tuber- 
culosis of the brain and its coverings, known as 
tubercular meningitis; while about the same pro- 
portion are due to syphilis and malaria. 

Not merely has the fatality of convulsions been 
both exaggerated and misinterpreted, but their 
effect upon the mental development of the child 
as well. It was quite commonly believed until 
recently that an attack of convulsions in infancy 
might blight the child's whole future development 
and leave it either epileptic or feeble-minded. The 
real fact of the matter was just the reverse — viz., 
that many cases of epilepsy begin in infancy and 
early childhood, and the convulsion which "caused" 
the succession of fits following it all through life, is 
itself the first epileptic seizure. The stories for 
instance, of children having been thrown into con- 
vulsions and made epileptic and feeble-minded ever 
after by some particular food given them — most 
commonly meat — had for their basis this belief 
that convulsions were due to errors of digestion 
and caused epilepsy. Not more than one per cent. 
of convulsions in infancy are followed either by 
epilepsy or feeble-mindedness. While on the other 
hand, data gathered in homes for the feeble-minded, 
and colonies for the epileptic show that something 
like forty per cent, of both of these unfortunate 
classes suffered from convulsions in childhood. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE SWEET TOOTH 



WHY do we always couple" sweetness and 
light" — with sweetness in the lead — 
as our highest conception of spiritual 
development? Why is it that in all literatures 
and legends "sweet" is invariably associated with 
"sound," wholesome — the scent of flowers, the 
song of birds, the golden sunlight — with everything 
that is pure and fresh and sound ? Why is a sweet- 
heart the most delightful form of cardiac motor 
that can be begged, borrowed, or stolen anywhere? 
Why don't we say "sour as a May morning," "al- 
kaline" as the breath of kine, "bitter" as the 
nightingale's song, "nutritious" as the new-mown 
hay? Because deep down, instinctively in the heart 
of us, we feel, no matter what the preachers or 
philosophers or the health journals may say, that, 
to paraphrase Browning's defense of beauty, 

If you get sweetness and naught else beside, 
You get about the best thing God invents. 

Sweetness is to the taste what beauty is to the 
eye — nature's stamp of approval and certificate 
of wholesomeness. It is one of the most universal 

52 



THE SWEET TOOTH 53 

flavours of foodstuffs known. Over one half of 
our real foods taste sweet or sweetish — that is, 
they contain sugar in some form. About one third 
taste salty; not more than one tenth taste either 
bitter or sour. The experience of millions of years, 
reaching far beyond even our arboreal ancestors, 
has taught us beyond possibility of forgetting that, 
while there are hundreds of things that taste salty 
which have no food value, and scores of things that 
taste bitter that not only have no food value but are 
even poisonous; and thousands of things, like leaves* 
and sawdust and cocoanut matting, which have' 
no food value at all until advertised as breakfast 
foods, there are comparatively few things that 
taste sweet which are not real foods. A very few 
of these sweet-tasting things, while real foods, are 
also poisonous, but these we soon learn to detect 
and beware of. 

It was only in comparatively recent years that we 
discovered and realized how exceedingly wide- 
spread sugar in some form was in all of our food 
substances. That universal and omnipresent prim- 
itive staff of life — milk — upon which every mam- 
mal that walks or climbs, or swims, must begin its 
existence, whether it is to wear fur or bristles or 
clothes, whether it is to be carnivorous, herbivorous, 
omnivorous, or fletcherite, contains sugar as one of 
its three most important elements. Nor is this, 
as is popularly supposed, a mere trace, barely enough 



54 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

to give the characteristic sweetish taste of milk, 
but it is a full-blown member of the great trinity 
of nutrient materials, sugar {carbohydrate) , meat 
{protein) and fat, and constitutes nearly one third 
of the nutritive value of this liquid food — the best 
liquid food, it may be remarked in passing, that has 
ever yet been invented, the only one on which life 
can be maintained for prolonged periods; while the 
utmost ingenuity of the chemist and the manu- 
facturer has never yet been able to produce another 
liquid food, no matter what it may shine forth 
as in the advertisements, which, bulk for bulk, is 
equal in nutritive value to milk. 

Milk is literally liquid flesh, containing all our 
body stuffs in exactly the proportion in which they 
are required in childhood, and needing only a 
little sugar or starch added to be the same for adult 
life. It is the only infant's food on which infants 
will live, though they can be made to feed on a 
variety of others. The curse and cause of infants' 
foods is a vegetable product — starch — whose sole 
merit is its cheapness, and which has slain more 
innocents than a hundred Herods. Every animal, 
and for the matter of that, bird or fish, whatever 
it may become in later life, gets its start as a meat- 
eater — a carnivore; and however well or ill adult 
human beings may be able to stand vegetarianism, 
if it were enforced in the nursery it would wipe out 
the human race in a single generation. 



THE SWEET TOOTH 55 

There can be few better illustrations of the 
impossibility — I had almost said absurdity — of 
attempting to draw hard and fast chemical lines 
through our menus than the distribution of sugar. 
Not only does the one food which we have all had 
to begin life on — milk — contain it in considerable 
amounts, and all our starchy foods, cereals, fruits r 
tubers, etc., depend upon it for their sole nutritive 
value, but every known meat, fish, flesh, fowl, or 
"gude red herrin'" also contains it in appreciable 
amounts, and some of them, such as liver, strange 
as it may seem, contain it in as large amounts as 
many vegetables or fruits. When we speak of 
"meat" or of the flesh of animals, we usually mean 
the muscles, which eons of experience have taught us 
to be the safest and wholesomest part of the animal 
body to eat, least liable to contain either disease 
germs or ptomaines. Every tiniest fibre of this 
muscle-stuff contains both glucose and a special 
sugar known as muscle-sugar, or inosite, whose 
presence gives the peculiarly sweet and juicy taste 
to the better cuts of beef, and the flesh of fat or young 
animals, which is more abundantly stored with this 
substance than that of old, lean, or hard-worked 
ones. Much of the dryness and tastelessness of 
game killed either early in the spring, after the 
long winter's famine, or in the tropics or on the 
plains at the close of a long period of drought, is 
due to the absence of this sugar, which has been 



56 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

burned up by the animal in the process of starva- 
tion. 

Many savage tribes, having, perforce, to live, not 
upon the well-fatted and little-exercised beeves and 
wethers of our farmyards, but upon the lean, hun- 
gry, and everlastingly active and " India-rubbery " 
antelope, mountain goat, and jack-rabbit, not to 
mention coyote, mink, muskrat and other such 
"small deer," have formed the habit of cooking 
iheir meat and flavouring their stews with maple- 
sugar or honey, just as we would use salt or spices. 
Indeed, almost every civilized menu shows traces 
and survivals of this strange primitive mixture, 
such as apple sauce with pork, currant jelly with 
tnutton, cranberries with turkey, prunes with roast 
duck, mince meat; in Italy, pears with stewed veal; 
in Germany, cherries and strawberries in cabbage 
soup; in Sweden, raisins in meat stew. 

This wide-spread prevalence of sugar in the mus- 
cles and other tissues of the animal body everywhere 
— the physiological reason for which we shall con- 
sider later — helps to explain the extraordinary 
prevalence of the sweet tooth throughout the animal 
kingdom. It is not perhaps generally known, 
except to those who have had much to do with 
wild animals in captivity or in their native haunts, 
but there is scarcely an animal of any class, not even 
the purest carnivore which does not crave sugar in 
some form and cannot be taught to eat it greedily. 



THE SWEET TOOTH 57 

It may decline it at first, because it has no smell. 
It must be tasted to be recognized. 

It may be remarked in passing that this is simply 
another illustration of the biologic absurdity of an 
exclusive diet of any sort, whether vegetarian, 
fruitarian, "nutty-arian," or raw-fooder. There is 
no such thing in the animal kingdom as a pure 
vegetarian, all of us having begun on milk; not even 
in the bird class, for every nestling is carnivorous — 
a grub, insect, or fish eater — and there is no such 
thing as an exclusive meat-eater, or carnivore, with 
the possible exception of a few blood-suckers like 
the weasel and the vampire bat. 

If you have any doubts as to the sweet tooth of 
wild animals, even including those that are usually 
classed as carnivore, or beasts of prey, just go to a 
patch of sand-cherries on the plains of Wyoming or 
western Nebraska in the fruit season and look at 
the prints on the sandy soil under the little bushes, 
and if you know anything of woodcraft you will need 
no further evidence to convince you that this is the 
Waldorf-Astoria for half the surrounding country- 
side. The main web of the network of crossing and 
recrossing trails and footprints is made up of the 
tiny pads of prairie squirrels, marmots, jack-rabbits, 
and the like; but striding boldly across the pattern 
in every direction, you will find the Bertillon prints 
of scores of coyotes, of swifts or prairie-foxes, of 
mink, of skunk, and of badger, while if near enough 



$8 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

to a box canon or a pass in the foot-hills leading up 
to the mountains, you will find the big saucer-like 
print of the mountain Hon, or the huge paw of the 
cinnamon, or the grizzly. A blackberry patch in 
the Adirondacks or a salmon-berry or salal thicket 
in the Cascades, the Siskyous or the Sierras will 
show the autographs of every inhabitant of the 
surrounding woods and waters. 

One of the most interesting developments in the 
chemistry of foods has been the discovery that not 
merely do all staple vegetable foods either consist 
chiefly of, or contain starch-sugars, such as the grains, 
nuts, fruits, etc., but that our pure animal foods 
— meats, fish, game, etc. (proteins) , contain from 
twenty-five to fifty-five per cent, of their energy 
in the form of animal sugar (glycocol), or animal 
starch (carbohydrate). So that any diet which it is 
possible to discover in a state of nature contains 
considerable amounts of sugar-starch. This is 
interestingly shown in a most unexpected quarter 
by that serious and well-known disease, diabetes, 
whose most striking feature, of course, is the escape 
of considerable quantities of sugar from the body, 
through the kidneys. This, with perfectly natural 
but infantile logic, was first believed to be due to 
the eating of excessive amounts of sugar in the food, 
but this delusion was quickly exploded, as it was 
found that the sugar of diabetes came chiefly from 
the starch of the food. Our next "grammar-grade" 



THE SWEET TOOTH 59 

step was therefore to cut starch entirely out of the 
dietary of the diabetic; but, much to our surprise, 
while this would for a time prevent the appearance 
of sugar, as the disease progressed the sugar would 
reappear, even upon a diet absolutely free from either 
sugar or starch in any form. 

We were puzzled to know how the diabetic body 
could manage to make sugar out of proteids until 
a more careful analysis of muscle fibre and the curd 
of milk showed that both of these pure proteid 
substances contained a large per cent, of starch- 
sugar and that the patient was also breaking down 
and burning up his own tissues in the desperate 
endeavour to replace the sugar cut out of his food. 
This was proved to be true both by weighing the 
patient and discovering that the loss of his body 
weight corresponded quite accurately to the amount 
of sugar which he excreted, and also by giving him 
large extra amounts of meat in his dietary and find- 
ing that much of the sugar-starch contained in it 
appeared as sugar in the urine. The real disease 
and fatal defect of the diabetic is, precisely, his 
inability to burn sugar; and his steady decline and 
almost certain ultimate death are a painfully vivid 
illustration of the importance of this food in the 
body. 

So that this disease, which was long believed to 
illustrate the dangers of eating sugar, is, in reality, 
a most convincing proof of its importance and 



60 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

necessity as a food. Instead of depriving our dia- 
betic patients of both starch and sugar completely, 
we now endeavour to increase their power of burning 
sugar, or by short "starch fasts" and by experi- 
mentation with other starches than wheat, such 
as oatmeal, rice, potatoes, soy-bean and various 
preparations of curds. Fortunately, some diabetics 
who cannot burn more than very small amounts of 
wheat starch, in the form of bread, will be able to 
burn enough starch to keep up their strength, in 
the form of oatmeal or potatoes. 

All of which clearly proves from a scientific point 
of view, what we have known by instinct for the last 
three million years, viz., that sugar is a full member 
of the great Dietetic Trinity, the three great indis- 
pensable food substances: Meats, Starch-sugars, 
Fats (proteins, carbohydrates, hydrocarbons), without 
which no animal can maintain life or health. If 
any man is going to maintain an exclusive diet from 
which any one of these three food foundation-stones 
is to be omitted, in the first place he will have to do 
it on laboratory or factory products; and in the 
second place he will have to eat considerable amounts 
of his tabooed substance without knowing it — or 
admitting it in public — if he expects to continue 
on this mundane sphere. Perhaps on the other side 
of Jordan we may succeed in existing upon sugar- 
free, meat-free, grease-free, purin-free, or salt-free 
dietary, but never on this. 



THE SWEET TOOTH 61 

Now, what is all this sugar doing "in that gallery' ' 
of the muscle cell? All sorts of curious answers 
have been returned to this question. It was sup- 
posed to be a sort of storage product — the liquid 
capital of the body's savings-bank, like fat, or like 
starch in the vegetable. It was even put down as 
a waste product, and it was only a few years ago 
that the real purpose and importance of its presence 
was discovered. To put it briefly and roughly, it 
serves as the fuel for the muscle engine. Each of 
those tiny explosions, which we call a contraction, 
of muscle, burns up and destroys a certain amount 
of sugar, and as soon as the free sugar in the muscle 
has been used up, then that muscle is as incapable 
of further contraction as an automobile is of speed 
when its gasoline tank is empty. 

Muscles of cold-blooded animals, like the heart 
of a tortoise, for instance, can be completely re- 
moved from the body and kept beating regularly, 
not merely for days, but even for weeks, as long 
as they are supplied with artificial "blood" to pump 
through themselves, consisting solely of a solution 
of certain proportions of salts and grape-sugar. 
While our muscle-engines can burn protein and, at 
a pinch, fat, yet it is pretty certain now that their 
chief and preferred fuel is sugar in some form. The 
best and most readily absorbed and combustible 
sugar is that contained, as we have seen, in meat, 
milk, etc. (proteins), but the starch of grains and the 



62 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

sugar of fruits is a pretty close second, though it is 
doubtful whether these alone can ever completely 
meet the fuel demands of the organism. Certainly 
every known animal and race of man has both his 
vigour and his disease-resisting power increased 
by taking part of his sugar-fuel in animal form. 

Practically, man, while preferring muscle protein 
and muscle sugar to all others, has always been 
both driven by necessity and led by instinct to 
draw a large share of both his protein and sugar- 
starch fuel from the vegetable kingdom. The 
greatest advantage of these vegetable foods is their 
cheapness, but they also possess certain other desir- 
able qualities, such as forming waste products which 
help to neutralize those produced by meat and which, 
being thrown off by the lungs in the form of carbon 
dioxid, help to relieve the otherwise heavy burden of 
excretion thrown upon kidneys and skin. Both 
the bulk and the majority of the fuel value of every 
known human diet save that of a few hunting tribes, 
consists of starch in some form and every particle 
of this has to be turned into sugar before it can be 
utilized in the body. 

A singular feature is that while practically every 
one concedes the wholesomeness, nay, even the posi- 
tive virtue of starch, there is a strong popular 
prejudice against its twin carbohydrate, sugar. 
Sugar-eating — candy-gorging — is denounced with- 
out stint both by mothers in Israel, hard-headed 



THE SWEET TOOTH 63 

economists, and diet reformers of all classes. It is 
bewailed as the dietetic sin of the century, the cause 
of the decay of modern teeth, of the alleged decline 
of modern physique and vigour, the fertile cause of 
fermentations and putrefactions in the stomach 
and bowels, the shortener of life and precipitator 
of old age; while an alarming list of the ills of twen- 
tieth-century humanity such as diabetes, gout, 
cancer, and nervous diseases are laid at its door. In 
fact, in certain circles it is berated almost as vehe- 
mently as a fons et origo mali as its second cousin, 
alcohol, is in others. This eager thirst for single 
and simple causes of multiple and complex evils 
is one of the pet obsessions of human thought. It 
invented the devil in primitive times, and the drink 
demon, the cigarette fiend, the meat lust, and the 
sugar habit of our own day. While our denuncia- 
tions of all these evils have unquestionably a 
certain amount of rational basis in fact, they have 
been and still are carried to absurd and injurious 
extremes. 

The very authorities who are most vehement 
against sugar are at the same time, like most diet 
reformers of to-day, ardent and devoted worshippers 
of starch, every particle of which has to be turned 
into sugar before it can be utilized by the body — 
not cane sugar or beet sugar, it is true — but one 
equally subject to fermentations of all sorts and 
even more capable of giving rise to diabetes, pre- 



64 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

mature old age, and the whole train of evils laid at 
its door. 

The principal causes of this distrust and denun- 
ciation of sugar seem to be: First, because children 
cry for it; second, it is attractive to the natural 
appetite and may be indulged in to excess, and is 
therefore wholly bad; the familiar argument of the 
monk and the ascetic of all ages against the "lusts 
of the flesh," including the family affections and 
half the virtues; third, because it is new, and therefore 
to be viewed with alarm and suspicion, and promptly 
accused as the cause of any new or newly discovered 
disease which cannot otherwise be accounted for. 

The first objection fortunately needs little at- 
tention nowadays. Powerful as it may have been 
in starting the prejudice against sugar, we recog- 
nized, years ago, that instinct, craving, an untaught 
preference for a particular thing or action always 
means something; indeed, we might almost say in 
Browning's phrase, that it " means intensely and 
means good, " in nine cases out of ten. It is the 
crystallized result of the experience of thousands of 
generations, and while, like all other impulses, it 
must take its place in the parliament of instincts 
and submit to the rules of order of reason, in the 
main it is a safe and invaluable guide. The young, 
unspoiled human animal has a liking for sugar just 
as it has for sunlight, for fresh air, for play, for pad- 
dling in the surf and plunging in the stream, or 



THE SWEET TOOTH 65 

for food when it is hungry and sleep when it is tired; 
and, subject of course to reasonable limitations, as 
wholesome as any of the others. This is precisely 
what our specialists in children's diseases, and broad- 
minded family physicians have been urging for 
decades past, and it would be safe to say that next 
to the banishment of starchy foods, gruels, and paps 
from the nursery and the substitution of pure, sweet 
milk, few things have done more to increase the vigour 
and happiness of modern children and to cut down 
our disgraceful infant mortality, than the free and 
intelligent use of sweet fruits, preserves, sugar, 
taffy, and butter-scotch in the nursery. 

One of the earliest additions that is now made to 
the exclusive milk diet of a six-months-old baby 
is the pulp of a baked apple, or the juice of stewed 
prunes, while sweet apple sauce, sweet oranges, 
bananas, and ripe fruits in their seasons are a regular 
and important part of all modern dietaries for young 
children. Nearly twenty years ago one physician- 
philosopher declared that if we would give children 
plenty of butter-scotch and taffy, they would need 
little cod-liver oil. And his prophecy has well-nigh 
been fulfilled already, for this "pampering" of the 
natural appetite of the child for sweet fruit, sugar, 
and candy, has resulted in very nearly banishing 
to the limbo of fecal medicine where it really be- 
longed, that nauseous relic of barbarism, cod-liver 
oil and its twin sisters, rhubarb, quassia, gentian, 



66 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and other bitters, whose principal virtue was their 
abominable taste. The diet of children has been 
far too much formulated in the past upon the simple 
and intelligence-saving principle of urging or even 
compelling them to eat that which they did not want, 
and depriving them of most things they did want. 

The regulation of their physical food was, like 
that of their mental pabulum in formal education, 
conceived too much in the spirit of the nursemaid 
who, missing two of her young charges, sent another 
one in search of them with orders to "find Miss 
Flossy and Master Ralph, see what they were 
doin', and tell them they mustn't ! " But fortunately 
we are outgrowing that sort of thing, and when we 
have completely done so, fully half of the prejudice 
against sugar will have disappeared. 

As to the second objection to sugar: that it is so 
attractive as to be easily indulged in to excess, it is 
merely necessary to remind ourselves in the quaint 
phrase of old Ben Jonson: 

But sweetest things turn sourest in their deeds, 
Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds — 

and that the more powerful a thing is for good, the 
more potent it may be for evil if carried to an ex- 
treme. It is certainly one of the chief ethical ad- 
vantages of the starches that nobody but a cow or a 
rabbit would be tempted to indulge in them to excess; 
but to cut out of our dietary or even discourage the 
use of all substances which are highly appetizing 



THE SWEET TOOTH 67 

and seductively attractive, is simply a form of slow 
suicide. Yet this is the keynote and fundamental 
principle of the crusade of our diet reformers against 
meats and sugars. The practical result of cutting 
out or limiting the sugars and meats in our diet is 
to diminish its total amount, and such temporary or 
imaginary benefits as may follow are the results of 
a polite form of mild starvation. 

Children may eat too much sugar and they may 
also stay too long in their bath tub, or in the creek 
when they go in swimming, or get tanned or a head- 
ache from playing too long in the sun, or chilled by 
staying too long in the open air; but is that any 
sound reason why they should be deprived of sweets, 
sunlight, baths, and fresh air, or discouraged from 
indulging in them? All that is needed is a little 
common sense regulation and judicious supervision, 
not prohibition, or denunciation. Most of the 
extraordinary craving for pure sugar and candy, 
which is supposed to lead the average child to inevi- 
tably " founder himself" if left to his own sweet will 
and a box of candy, is due to a state of artificial 
and abnormal sugar starvation, produced by an 
insufficient amount of this invaluable food in its 
regular diet. Children who are given plenty of 
sugar on their mush, bread and butter, and puddings, 
a regular allowance of cake and plenty of sweet 
fruits, are almost free from this craze for candy, this 
tendency to gorge themselves to surfeit, and can 



68 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

usually be trusted with both the candy box and the 
sugar bowl. 

The last ground of prejudice against sugar, that of 
its newness, is interesting from several points of view. 
There is no more favourite and irrepressible delusion 
of the human mind than that this particular age 
in which we live is a degenerate one and that the 
rising generation is an especially striking example of 
that fact. Every time that a new disease is dis- 
covered — discovered just as America was by 
Columbus, it was there all the time only we had not 
the sense to recognize it — every old wiseacre lifts 
up his voice to the effect that: "We never had 
nawthin' like that when I was a boy." And since 
for a new phenomenon a new cause must be dis- 
covered, he usually proceeds to promptly accuse one 
of "these here new-fangled foods." 

Thus, our modern abundance of fruit and preserves 
is confidently brought forward as the cause of 
appendicitis. Tomatoes are gravely accused of 
being the cause of cancer, the cigarette of every 
variety of youthful depravity; and sugar as the 
fruitful mother of a whole brood of diseases and de- 
generacies. The process has been going on ever 
since the ark landed on Ararat and has not a par- 
ticle more basis in fact or solid common sense, than 
it had when it began. Incidentally, as a matter of 
fact, sugar is not a cause of modern degeneracy or 
shorter life, or increasing "onhelthyness," for the 



THE SWEET TOOTH 69 

simple but sufficient reason that the present gener- 
ation is taller, healthier, and longer-lived than any 
that has ever preceded it. Its abundance and 
cheapness is one of the causes of our improved and 
improving modern physique. 

However there is just this trifle more actual basis 
for dread of a possible excessive indulgence in sugar 
in these modern days, on this ground. That is, that 
whereas formerly sugar could only be secured in a 
very dilute form as a flavouring element in milk, 
fruits, grains, and the juices of certain plants, it 
can now be obtained both cheaply and abundantly 
in pure concentrated form. In a rough way, the 
sugar refinery and the growth of the cane and beet- 
root industry have done for sugar what the still 
has for alcohol — concentrated it and thus rendered 
over-indulgence more easy. Sugar, unquestionably, 
is a surprisingly modern luxury, and it is hard for us 
to realize sometimes that, up to about one hundred 
and fifty years ago, almost the only concentrated or 
pure form of sugar available was honey or dried 
tropical fruits, like figs and dates or, in certain dis- 
tricts, maple sugar. It was, emphatically, a rare 
and expensive luxury — in the days of King John 
"six lumps of sugar" were recorded as a royal present 
— and it is quite possible that an appetite for it 
whetted to the keenest possible edge by such rarity, 
might, if not watched and moderated, lead to excess. 

But there is this fundamental difference between 



7o WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

the craving for sugar and that for " sours," acids, 
vinegar, pickles, etc., alcohol, and for other keen 
flavours and highly attractive luxuries, that it is a 
real food of very high food-value and very promptly 
and readily absorbable, which none of the others are, 
except in small degree. As we have seen, this 
violent craving for sugar, leading to excess, largely 
disappears in children when their healthy demand for 
it is supplied by a proper mixture with their foods; 
while no child yet has ever inherited or been born 
with a taste for alcohol, pickles, tea, coffee or tobacco. 
One of the greatest values of sugar, apart from its 
high-steaming power, is the rapidity with which it 
can be absorbed and burned in the body engine. 
The careful and exhaustive researches of Lee, 
Mosso, Harley, and Schomburg showed that there 
was no food which would restore working power to 
fatigued muscles of both men and animals, so 
quickly and effectively as pure sugar. Indeed it was 
suggested by Professor Lee that tired business men, 
carried beyond their regular lunch hour, would find 
a few lumps of pure sugar one of the best of tempor- 
ary restoratives and "pick-me-ups," far superior to 
alcohol. This is probably the reason why some 
individuals when fatigued will retain an appetite 
for sweet things though they have almost completely 
lost it for anything else. 

Indeed, the role and importance of sugar as a 
rapid reliever of fatigue is one which we are only 



THE SWEET TOOTH 71 

just beginning to appreciate, and which goes sur- 
prisingly far already. It has been incorporated into 
the most hardheaded, cold-blooded, matter-of-fact 
diet on earth, the German army rations, especially 
the "forced-march" emergency ration. No other 
food of its bulk can take its place. It is the belief 
of careful observers of men, particularly in the 
tropics, that the larger the amount of sugar, and 
sugar-containing foods they are supplied with, 
the less alcohol and other stimulants they will crave. 
For instance, the United States Government now 
buys the best and purest of candy by the ton, 
and ships it to the Philippines, to be supplied to 
the canteens and messes, finding that its use dimin- 
ishes the craving for native brandy; and it has long 
been a matter of comment from thoughtful ob- 
servers that the amount of drunkenness of a race 
or class is in inverse ratio to the amount of sugar it 
consumes. 

There is less drunkenness in America than in any 
North European country, and the first thing that 
strikes a European of intelligence on landing in this 
country is the extraordinary abundance and mul- 
tiplicity of candy stores, ice-cream parlors, and 
venders of sweets, fruits, and " hokey-pokey." In 
Germany, for instance, it is considered unmanly to 
confess to a taste for sweets. It seems not impossible 
that the well-known anthropologic fact that drunk- 
enness is a function of temperature, that only the 



72 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

Northern races, roughly speaking, are drinkers to 
excess, while the Southern races are comparatively 
temperate, may be connected with the fact that the 
South and the sub-tropics are the home of abundant 
fruits and vegetables rich in sugar, such as grapes, 
figs, dates, bananas, yams, sugar cane, etc. Fruits 
and nuts, until within the last fifteen or twenty years, 
scarcely entered into the regular diet of the working 
and lower middle classes of Northern Europe, save 
for a few weeks in summer, while they have always 
formed an important staple the year round upon 
the tables of the Italians, the Spaniards, and the 
Greeks. It is not unlikely that the almost universal 
and devoutly to be thankful for lack of craving for 
alcohol in children and in women is due largely to 
the sweet tooth possessed by them and their indul- 
gence in candy, cakes, fruit, ice-cream, and sweet- 
meats generally. Certain it is that our most care- 
ful students of social problems are coming to the 
opinion that an abundant and well-cooked dietary, 
with plenty of variety in it, especially in the form of 
fruits, sugars, cakes, and creams is, combined with 
plenty of wholesome recreation and sensible amuse- 
ment, the best antidote known for the alcohol habit 
— indeed, together, they are steadily undermining 
it all over the land. In fine, a taste for sweets, while 
it should be indulged like everything else, in reason 
and moderation, instead of being repressed, should 
be cultivated, indulged, and broadened, as one of 



THE SWEET TOOTH 73 

our most valuable tendencies, not only on hygienic 
but also on moral grounds. 

More than fifty years ago it was declared by the 
warden of Millbank, one of England's great convict 
reformatories, that he had always hope of the refor- 
mation of a criminal, no matter how violent or 
apparently depraved, so long as he retained an 
appetite for apple pie! 

The days of innocence and the sweet tooth seem 
closely linked together. 



CHAPTER V 

THE KINDERGARTEN AGE 

THE first danger-signal in the kindergarten 
age is the kindergarten itself. The keynote 
of the nursery stage of man is food, sun- 
shine, and rest. The keynote of the kindergarten 
stage is food, open air, and exercise. The schoolroom 
supplies none of these; hence it is, at this stage, a 
superfluity a hindrance to growth, both physical and 
mental. There is nothing done in the kindergarten 
which could not be far better done in the playground 
or a real garden; nothing taught but what healthy 
children would teach themselves, under intelligent 
supervision and guidance. Moreover, the kinder- 
garten violates nature's most insistent rule — that 
the growing child shall be able to give a valid 
excuse for every hour spent indoors. Even its sleep 
is better taken as nearly as possible in the open air. 
Indoor work of any sort, and particularly that which 
is done sitting down, traverses absolutely the natural 
order of growth and development of the child. What 
he needs and is most interested in is large, full, 
sweeping movements, involving the whole arm, or 
both limbs, or all of these together and the body as 

74 



THE KINDERGARTEN AGE 75 

well, instead of little, precise, carefully guided, 
toy-mouse kinds of movements with the hand and 
fingers alone. Accuracy, precision, precise propor- 
tion, he is absolutely incapable of now and should 
not even be allowed to attempt. Nothing could be 
much worse for an active, sturdy, growing child, 
who wants to run and tumble, wave his arms about 
and kick his legs in the air and shout, than to be 
planted in a footsy little chair at a doll's-house 
table, pricking tiny holes in a sweet little piece 
of perforated cardboard. It were better for him to 
be out in the street learning to fight and crawl 
through sewer-pipes. 

A child's eyes and crystalline lens and eye-muscles 
are all, at this age, adapted to what his interests 
call for, viz., looking at large, swiftly moving, readily 
visible objects, preferably at a distance of eight or 
ten feet, or more. He, in one sense, is born old, in 
that he is born slightly far-sighted; and to compel 
him to concentrate his attenion,for hours at a stretch, 
upon small, intricate objects at close range is to- 
throw upon his elastic and readily mouldable eye- 
balls a strain for which they are utterly unfitted and 
which is exceedingly likely to result in compressing 
them out of shape, causing them to elongate and to 
become myopic, or short-sighted. Close work, after 
ten or twelve years of age, while it may seriously 
fatigue the muscles of the eyes, can do little to change 
its shape; but between four and seven there is no 



76 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

question of the serious damage which may be done 
by aggravating any short-sightedness with which 
the child was born, or producing it in those who would 
otherwise have escaped it. Examinations of the 
eyes of thousands of young children in all parts of 
the world — savage, barbarian, and civilized — 
have shown that they all practically start in life 
with the same shape of eye, viz., a slightly flattened 
or long-sighted one, and that the percentage of those 
who develop myopia, or short sight, is in precise 
relation to the carliness with which they are put into 
school and the constancy and length of their con- 
finement in the schoolroom. 

Moral: Don't worry about the school you are 
going to send your baby to. Keep him out of any 
sort as long as your conscience will let you — and 
then a year longer. This is perfectly good and safe 
advice. A child's proper business is to grow, and to 
exercise his powers as fast as he gets them. This 
gives him an enormous appetite, which causes more 
growth and again calls for more exercise of new- 
found powers. In so far as school is carried out 
within four walls, it does nothing to help this progress 
and much to hinder it. It may be tolerated, but 
on sufferance only, and the rule at this stage should 
be to reduce it to a minimum. Nine tenths of the 
growth that the modern child under ten makes, 
whether physical or mental, he makes in spite of 
school, not on account of it. 



THE KINDERGARTEN AGE 77 

There is no need whatever for conflict between 
education and growth; indeed, all the most intelli- 
gent and progressive teachers, from kindergarten 
to high school, are at one with the doctor and the 
sanitarium and anxious to harmonize them. All 
the rational aims of school can be attained with far 
less friction and labour for both teachers and pupils 
by methods much less inimical to the child's health. 
If school hours were cut down to two hours a day, 
and the time saved devoted to intelligently super- 
vised natural play, gardening, carpentering, etc., 
in the open air, children would make just as rapid 
progress in their studies, even under our present 
antiquated curriculum as they do now. 

Purely from the point of view of vital economics, 
I know of few institutions more wasteful of the time, 
the health, and the temper of both children and 
teachers than our present school system. True, 
it doesn't do much harm, because the young human 
animal is most providentially tough, and will continue 
to grow and develop such powers as he was born 
with, both physical and mental, no matter what is 
done to him, so long as he is well fed, gets plenty of 
sleep, and is given a chance to get into the open air 
a few hours each day. 

The hygienic conditions of the schoolroom may 
be better than the homes of its children, but they 
are always worse than those of their play places, 
which they would live in if released; and five hours' 



78 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

daily confinement at hard labour is hygienically an 
exceedingly poor substitute for a day in nature's 
great school — all outdoors ! 

Still abideth the trinity of growth — food, air, 
exercise; these three, and the greatest of these is 
food. Our little human locomotive must have 
fuel first, fuel last, fuel all the time. Not merely 
what he needs to keep him running twenty-four 
hours out of the twenty-four, for he is the embodied 
secret of perpetual motion, but enough to enable 
him to grow from a tiny donkey-engine into a great 
six-foot-wheeled, mountain-climbing mogul. Also 
incidentally remember that his running gear and 
cylinders and driving-wheels are not made of starch, 
and he cannot build them out of mushes and pud- 
dings and potatoes, any more than he can make 
bricks without straw. 



CHAPTER VI 

FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 

EVER since the day of the Seven Ages of Man 
we have known that a man passes through a 
series of distinct and different stages in 
the course of his life. But we do not so clearly real- 
ize that he is also a different creature, often widely 
so, in each one of those stages. The child is not 
"father of the man," as the absurd old proverb 
declares, but his "grub," or in technical language, 
his larval stage and as different from him in many 
respects as a caterpillar is from a butterfly. The 
baby not only crawls, but eats enormously, de- 
vouring nearly four times as much in proportion to 
his body weight as a grown-up does. The child 
rises above the crawling part of the caterpillar 
stage, but still retains the appetite. He literally 
lives to eat, devouring things like an army worm 
and is never happy — or healthy — when awake, 
unless devouring, or digesting something. 

The appetite of a healthy child of the kinder- 
garten age is something appalling. He is a walking 
famine, a hunger incarnate. All is grist that comes 
to his mill, and all hours of the day or night are 

79 



80 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

alike to him. But he needs every ounce that he 
will devour, and not one penny's worth of it will be 
wasted. Don't bother about the child. Just be 
sure that his food is right, pure, sound, and of the 
best quality, then let him go ahead! His wisdom is 
of the ages; yours where it clashes with his, is of 
the almanacs, of the catechisms and copybooks, of 
the silly chatter of the street and the kitchen. If 
children were not born hungry and continued so as 
long as they were growing, they would never grow 
up; for, even with the utmost liberality and kindest 
intentions on the part of us parents, we never can 
quite retain a realizing sense, a living memory, of 
the actual kind of appetite we had when we were 
boys, and how we absolutely suffered to eat! "The 
boy gets three square meals a day, just as I do, 
and eats almost as much!" we exclaim. "What 
more can he want?" Three square meals a day 
for a healthy boy are just the mere foundation of his 
day's eating. 

Eating is a serious and conscientious business 
with him. He devotes a considerable share of his 
mind to it. And he is eternally and fundamentally 
right about it, as both biology and physiology have 
shown us. Yet up to a decade or two ago the most 
highly approved and frequently harped-upon theme 
in the petty morality of the nursery and the Sunday 
school was the greediness of naughty little boys and 
girls and its Terrible Consequences, from whippings 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 81 

to colics and sudden death. Had we known of 
appendicitis then it would have been included as 
one of the bogies. 

Upon what physiologic or rational basis the great, 
sacred dietetic principle of Three Square Meals a 
Day and No Eating Between Meals was founded is 
difficult of discovery, even for adults, and impos- 
sible for children. It certainly has no basis in the 
broad field of animal habits and experiments. Most 
animals in a state of nature eat whenever they can 
get food and until they can hold no more. Cows 
and horses, for instance, at pasture, graze steadily 
from half to two thirds of the day or in summer 
time, night. These scarcely come within the direct 
line of our ancestry, even on Darwinian principles, 
but I can't help thinking that traces of their char- 
acters occasionally appear in our children. So 
that, ancestrally, the healthy human stomach 
ought to be able to take care of any article of food 
in reason, in any amount within the cubic capacity 
of its walls, at any hour of the day or night. Thou- 
sands of experiments have shown that it has pre- 
cisely the powers that might have been expected of 
it, on ancestral grounds. 

The notion that the stomach requires a certain 
definite interval of rest between tasks in order to get 
up its supply of gastric juice has been completely 
exploded, inasmuch as it has been found that the 
resting and empty stomach contains no gastric 



82 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

juice whatever; and it secretes none until food is 
actually put into it or smelled. In other words, 
it makes its gastric juice during the process of 
digestion just as it is needed, and, in all probability, 
out of the very food which it is digesting. The best, 
indeed the only, way to make the stomach secrete 
is to feed it, not rest it! 

The principal sanction of the three-meals-a-day 
plan for adults is based upon convenience, taking 
as the distance between the longest period for which 
experience has shown the human stomach can be 
"loaded" comfortably without undue distention, 
and then spacing these times of loading at such 
hours as will least interfere with both the work and 
the business of the men, and the preparative labour 
of the women of the household. Meals in fact, are 
placed on an average, about five hours apart simply 
because this is the average run which the human 
locomotive can make before it needs to be coaled 
again. Not because our Sacred Stomach and 
Much-worshipped Digestion require a fixed and 
stated interval of rest between activities. If any 
one feels hungry between meals, let him eat by all 
means, providing that he eats that which is nutri- 
tious and reasonably digestible. It is a sure sign 
that he either ate too little at his last meal, or has 
worked too much, or in the case of the child, grown 
too much, since. As a matter of fact, the best fed 
and best nourished classes and peoples eat at least 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 83 

four, and often five meals a day instead of the sacred 
three. 

Therefore, let whoever has charge of the feeding 
of the growing child of the kindergarten age, de- 
liberately plan and supply him with appropriate, 
appetizing and nutritious food materials suitable 
for " piecing'* between meals, viz., sandwiches, milk, 
cookies, bread and butter, or rather butter and bread, 
bread and cheese, crackers, particularly sweet ones, 
nuts, fruit, candy. The size of a child's stomach is 
limited, and it simply cannot be filled full enough of 
ordinary food to carry him safely and comfortably 
over more than four or five hours. It is a good 
thing to have three or more regular meals, because 
it has been found, particularly in the feeding of 
babies that, whimsical as it may sound, a child's 
stomach must be stretched at intervals if it is to 
grow properly. It does not serve to administer the 
precise number of calories required in small doses 
two hours apart. The best results are obtained 
by three good, satisfying square meals a day, where 
he stays at the table until he drops off of his own 
accord, with one liberal piecing, or impromptu 
lunch in the middle of the morning, another in the 
middle of the afternoon and another, if desired at 
bedtime. This, by the way, is the regimen by which 
we cure consumption nowadays, and what will cure 
a sick man is scarcely likely to be fatal to a healthy 
one! 



84 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

The child is consumed by the fever of growth as 
actively as the consumptive is by his hectic. When 
this rule is adopted, it will stop at once most of the 
abnormal cravings and gorgings and cramming 
themselves with all sorts of indigestible, unripe 
and unwholesome materials on the part of children. 
A healthy child would rather eat sound, whole- 
some, clean food. It is only when he cannot get it 
in sufficient amounts, or often enough, that he eats 
grass and green twigs and shoots and green apples 
and groundnuts, and "lickorish" and raw turnips, 
or carrots, or gorges himself to excess upon candy, 
or nuts, or cookies. When children are properly 
and adequately fed, they can be trusted with the 
candy box, the open fruit-basket and the nut bag, 
to say nothing of the key to the jam closet, or the 
pantry. 

Here is a rational and physiologic day's march 
through this stage of his life's journey for a healthy 
growing boy or girl, of from five to seven years of 
age: 

Eight a. m., breakfast, consisting chiefly of milk, 
eggs, bacon, ham, fish, mutton chops, with butter, 
bread, toast, griddle cakes, cereals, or cookies and 
fruit or preserves; and if a hot drink be desired, weak 
cocoa. (For details see menus.) Starches of all 
sorts, except bread should be used only as a supple- 
ment to, or "filler" with milk, eggs, meat or fish, 
or if taken alone should have plenty of sugar and 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 85 

cream on them. The sugar and cream for instance, 
eaten with a dish of cereal form the most valuable 
part of the dish. Eight-thirty to ten-thirty, play 
in the open air, or if the ground be wet underfoot, 
or the weather too inclement, in a shed, barn or 
gymnasium. Ten-thirty, lunch, consisting of bread 
and milk, sandwiches, ham, beef, cheese or egg, cook- 
ies, cake, bread and jam, bread and "lasses," nuts 
particularly roasted or salted, and fruit. Eleven 
to twelve-thirty, more play in the open air including 
half or three quarters of an hour's light "lessons," 
in a well ventilated room, or outdoors if the weather 
permits. Twelve-thirty, dinner, consisting of meat, 
particularly beef, mutton, or pork, potatoes with one 
or more vegetables, especially tomatoes, peas, let- 
tuce, celery and onions, with plenty of dessert con- 
sisting of sweet puddings, pie (omitting the bottom 
crust), cake, honey preserves, or fresh fruit. If 
soup is given, it should never exceed more than a 
few tablespoonfuls in amount, as it has absolutely 
no nutritive value whatever and is useful only as an 
appetizer, and Introduction Committee to the real 
foods of the meal. There is ground for the belief 
that the stomach is stimulated by soups and meat 
extracts, to secrete the gastric juice, if indeed it 
does not actually use them in the process of making 
that juice. 

If the child has been playing in the open air the 
greater part of the morning and is reasonably 



86 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

healthy, and is started upon the meats and vegetables 
first, he may be given practically as many helpings 
as he will take of these, or even of the desserts, without 
serious danger to his digestion, save during the first 
few days, or weeks, when he is placed upon this 
unrestrained sugar and sweet ration. When chil- 
dren have once got the sugar hunger of their tissues 
reasonably satisfied, they show little or no tendency 
to gorge themselves upon pie, pudding, candy, or 
sweets, and a little intelligent oversight and gentle 
restraint is all that is needed to keep them within 
bounds. And how they will grow and gain weight, 
and lose their irritable temper and whiny ways 
and nervousness! 

Half of our "high strung," " difficult," nervous 
modern children are sugar-hungry and often sleep- 
hungry as well. Plenty of sugar has almost as 
sweetening an effect upon the disposition, as it has 
upon the flavour of food. One to two, sleep or rest 
in a darkened room. Two to four, play in the open 
air; four, afternoon tea consisting of cookies, sand- 
wiches, doughnuts, bread and butter, cake, jam, 
nuts, or almonds with either milk, or weak cocoa. 
Four-thirty to six, play in the open air, or in a well- 
ventilated nursery, barn or play room, according 
to the season, with half an hour to an hour of 
pleasant lessons with plenty of pictures and demon- 
strations. Six o'clock, supper, consisting of eggs, 
fish, or some light meat or cheese dish, potatoes, 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 87 

a salad vegetable with bread and butter, toast, 
tea or other hot cakes, jam, cookies or fruit with 
milk or weak cocoa. Games or entertaining reading, 
or stories, until seven-thirty or eight, according to 
age, then bed. It is a good thing to leave a glass of 
milk, or crackers, on a chair beside the bed so that if 
the child wakes up in the night and is hungry, he 
can help himself; and particularly have these where 
he can get at them early in the morning before the 
regular breakfast hour. 

MENUS 

BREAKFAST 

8 o'clock 

Two slices of broiled bacon One boiled egg 

Hot rolls 

One cup cocoa or one glass milk 

One orange 

LUNCHEON 
11 o'clock 
One glass milk (with cream in it) 

One slice bread, butter and jam 

DINNER 

1 o'clock 
One cup bouillon One mutton chop 

Mashed potatoes, peas 

One cup apple and custard pudding 

TEA 
4.30 o'clock 
One glass milk (with cream in it) 
One cup weak cocoa Two sugar cookies 



88 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

SUPPER 

6 o'clock 

Minced beef on toast Potato straws 

Lettuce 

Stewed fruit with cream Sponge cakes 

BREAKFAST 

8 o'clock 

Broiled fish or poached egg Water cress 

Corn muffins Baked apple with cream 

Cup cocoa 

LUNCHEON 

II o'clock 

I glass of milk with cream in it 

Piece of bread and butter with jelly 

DINNER 
I o'clock 
Chicken with rice or potato balls 

Spinach or asparagus tips 
Rolls Fruit Pudding with custard sauce 

TEA 

4.30 o'clock 

One glass of milk Gingerbread or chocolate cake 

SUPPER 
Creamed chip beef Boiled macaroni 

Baking powder biscuit with plum jelly- 
Cocoa 

As will be seen, the most prominent place in this 
dietary is assumed by varying proteins or " meats." 
This is for the reason that children are made out of 
proteins and fats, and would yield, on the most 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 89 

exhaustive analysis, only small percentages of starch. 
Youth is the period of growth, and if children are to 
enlarge their bodies they must be supplied with an 
abundance of those materials out of which their 
bodies are built. The rule is an absolutely unbroken 
one, throughout the whole of the animal kingdom. 
All young mammals for instance, live for the first 
sixth, or third of their growth period exclusively 
upon protein in the form of milk and flesh. All 
young birds, no matter what will be their food habits 
when they grow up, have to be fed throughout their 
entire growth period, up to complete feathering and 
flight, upon a diet consisting, in wild birds, of 
protein in the form of worms, grubs, insects, or fish; 
and in tame birds of hard boiled eggs, scraps 
of meat, curds or bone meal. 

The young human animal is no exception to the 
rule of his kind. Furthermore all proteins, or 
"meats," including milk, as we have seen, contain 
anywhere from one third to one half their bulk of 
carbohydrates, or animal starches, chiefly in the 
form of some modification of sugar. These animal 
sugars and starches are far the best and most 
digestible form in which starches can be adminis- 
tered to the child. The solid parts of milk for 
instance, consist of about one part protein, one 
part fat and one and a half parts sugar. Abun- 
dant experience has shown that if young animals 
are to be made to grow rapidly and thrive, they do 



9 o WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

best when given large amounts, not of starch or 
vegetable protein, but of milk, eggs, or meat. Even 
among grass-eating animals, such as cattle and 
horses, this rule holds, and where pedigreed calves, 
or colts, are being forced to the most rapid and 
vigorous growth for prize winning, or exhibition 
purposes, the food which is found most effective 
is large amounts of rich milk, which is added to their 
regular dietary by the gallon and the bucketful. 

Nearly all the evils supposed to result from ex- 
cessive meat eating in either children or adults, 
have been proved to be largely imaginary. Uric 
acid, for instance, has little or nothing to do 
with the amount of meat in the dietary, nor on the 
other hand has it any positive connection with 
the causation of gout, or lithemia, but is probably 
one of the symptoms of the underlying error of 
metabolism which causes these conditions. Meat 
or proteins of any sort have nothing whatever to 
do with the causation of Bright's disease, or any 
other form of disease of the kidneys. Nine tenths 
of these are the after-results of some acute in- 
fection like scarlet fever, pneumonia, tuberculosis, 
typhoid and even common colds. All the stories 
about children's being made " nervous" and "teeth 
grinders," or "bed wetters," or "thrown into fits 
and epilepsy" by meat are little better than fairy 
tales, or on a par with the old fable that if you hold 
a guinea pig up by its tail its eyes will drop out. 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 91 

These disturbances occur in a considerable per- 
centage of children from various causes, epilepsy 
always from congenital ones. Meat is, in our 
stingy philosophy, bad for children largely because 
it costs money! Ergo: Any scrap of meat that the 
unfortunate child happened to eat just before the 
restlessness, or convulsion, was the cause of it. 

The next most prominent place in the dietary 
should be given to fat, particularly in the form of 
good butter, as children require double the pro- 
portion of this in their food that adults do. The 
nursery is and always has been eternally and fun- 
damentally right in demanding plenty of butter on 
its bread. No Bread-and-Scrape for it! All starches, 
breads, puddings and cereals are, with the partial 
exception of corn meal, utterly lacking in fat and 
consequently should be eaten, according to instinct, 
with abundance of this element added in the form of 
butter, cream, or oil. Children should be allowed, 
yes encouraged, to eat butter and bread, rather 
than bread and butter. Because, while our adult 
needs call for only about one fifth of our total fuel 
in the form of fat, the child's more varied and in- 
tense demands for both activity and growth pur- 
poses call for from one fourth to one third of his 
fuel in this form, as instanced in the composition 
of milk with nearly one third of its solids fat. 

The next most prominent role is played by sugar. 
The prejudice against this most useful and valuable 



92 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

food for children is little better than a superstition 
and, I am happy to say, rapidly disappearing. 
Instead of its being a luxury and source of danger, 
one of our most competent and conservative, world- 
experts upon diet, Dr. Robert Hutchison, of London, 
summed up the feeling of the scientific world in 
the statement that "there have been few more im- 
portant additions to our dietary, or which have done 
more to promote the health of the rising genera- 
tion, than our cheap and abundant supply of pure 
sugar." The main arguments against its use were, 
first, that it cost money and, second, that children 
cried for it, and being unreasonable beings, and as 
Jonathan Edwards gently expressed it, "in the 
sight of God no better than young vipers," it was 
therefore sure to be "bad for them." If we had 
listened to the "wisdom of babes and sucklings" 
and given them what they craved a century earlier 
than we did, it would have been enormously to our 
advantage — and theirs 1 To "become as little chil- 
dren" is a pretty good preparation for health and 
wholesomeness as well as for entrance into the 
kingdom of heaven. 

Our programme also calls for a large amount of 
sleep. Ten to eleven hours at night and an hour 
in the middle of the day, but that again is simply 
one of the Magna Charta rights of the young, 
growing, human animal. Sleep is not a negative, 
but a positive process. Our up-building processes 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 93 

are at a maximum during sleep, our down-breaking 
ones, while awake. 

Food-and-play-and-sleep, sleep-and-food-and-play 
— these are the magic circles of childhood. Our 
best tonic for improving a child's appetite is to put it 
to bed. Many of our lean, nervous, overconscien- 
tious, restless modern children need, instead of more 
play and amusement, more sleep, or rest in bed. 
If your child is nervous, excitable, easily tired, with 
a poor appetite and pasty colour, keep him in bed, 
in a room with windows wide open, every morning 
until nine or ten o'clock; make him lie down on 
the lounge again at twelve for an hour or more 
and again at four, and get him to bed early. Mean- 
time feed him well with things that he likes, including 
plenty of meat, butter, sugar, cake, and fruit, and 
you will be astonished to see how his appetite,' 
nutrition, and temper improve. There is no par- 
ticular merit in sending children to bed with the 
chickens, so long as they are allowed to sleep as 
late as they want to in the morning. Sleeping 
to grow and get an appetite, eating to gratify that 
appetite, playing to get another one — this is the 
whole duty of child. 

But what, challenges some one, will become of 
the poor child's mind all this time? Did you ever 
happen to know of a healthy, happy, laughing 
child that was not considered " bright" and prom- 
ising? A child's mind during this period grows 



94 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

just as its organ, the brain, does, through the use 
of his senses and the exercise of his muscles. Like 
the bear's cubs, in the old legend, which were born 
as shapeless lumps and "licked into shape" by the 
mother bear, children are born little lumps of possi- 
bilities and played into shape, both body and mind. 
It needs no argument to prove that children have 
an instinct for this kind of development, just as 
they have for food and for sleep — an instinct as 
keen and intense that it will sometimes, if allowed, 
overmaster all others, vital and fundamental as 
they are. Children, if not watched and gently 
checked, will often rush away from the table before 
they have fully satisfied their appetites in order to 
resume their play. They will forget that most 
important epoch of their day, the dinner-hour, in 
the excitement of a game. 

The normal state of the healthy child is wriggling, 
or other more active motion, constantly, save when he 
is asleep or feeding. This the schoolroom deliber- 
ately sets out to put a stop to, and by so doing 
denies him his divine right to grow, utterly oblivious 
of the fact that a child will learn quickest on his feet, 
yes, on the run! It does not make much differ- 
ence what kind of seats and desks your kinder- 
garten or schoolroom has, provided the child is not 
expected to sit in them for more than fifteen minutes 
at a time, at this stage of his career. What a child 
most vitally needs in the way of mental development 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 95 

is acquaintance with and knowledge of his sur- 
roundings — training to see accurately and to draw 
conclusions from what he sees; training to touch 
and handle and mould and work with things; train- 
ing to hear and remember what he hears, and to 
work out the meaning of sounds, whether articulate 
or inarticulate, their relations to one another, their 
harmony or dissonance, their connections and asso- 
ciations with sights and smells and touch-per- 
ceptions; training to smell — to tell the difference 
between flowers and filth, between cream and cod- 
liver oil, between foul air and fresh, to reason out 
why he loves one and hates the other. There is 
very little need, at this stage, to teach a child what 
he should like and what he should dislike, only 
why he likes good and why he dislikes bad. 

Let the child learn to speak by speaking, under 
correction and intelligent supervision^ to read by 
hunting for the names and stories of his favourite 
pictures; to write by sending messages to others 
about what he has found out for himself, or wishes 
to communicate to them; to cipher by actually 
counting his jackstones and marbles and pocket- 
knives, by adding his gains and subtracting his 
losses, by multiplying his own profits and dividing 
the other fellow's, and he will master the Three 
R's without so much as the sight of a bench or the 
taste of a stick. 

Let every family have its own garden, with sand- 



96 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

heap, swings, and tool-house, with carpenter's bench 
and plenty of tools to dig and hack with and ground 
that can be dug and hacked to heart's content with- 
out blame or criticism. Where this is impossible, 
let six or a dozen families club together and provide 
a play garden, with proper equipment, for the joint 
use of all their children. Let them pick out some 
sweet-tempered, sensible, healthy girl, with a good 
accent and attractive manners, who loves children 
and has been trained to direct and assist in their 
games and sports, and turn over the whole brood 
to her for from two to five hours each day. 

Let the regular meeting-place of the "club" be 
at one of these play gardens and let this be equipped 
with a clean, well-lighted, airy barn or shed, in 
which plays or games can be carried on in wet or 
stormy" weather. Then once or twice a week let 
a good-natured local carpenter, or some manual- 
training teacher, give lessons in the use of tools 
and the building of boxes, toys, and other contrap- 
tions, to both boys and girls. Let them be given 
gardens and pet stock, which they shall take care 
of, and be responsible for, under the guidance of 
some one competent to teach them. 

Primary literature and history can both be taught 
in the form of the story, regular visits can be made, 
as the weather permits, first and most important 
of all, to woods and brooks and fields and gardens 
in the neighbourhood; then if the club be in a small 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 97 

town, or the country, to poultry-yards, dairy-farms, 
sheep-shearings, and harvest fields. If in a city, 
to zoological gardens, botanical gardens, museums, 
markets, docks, etc. 

Then if the children be encouraged to compare 
notes with, and describe to, one another what they 
have seen, in clear, simple, correct English, to 
write down their impressions, to make pictures 
of them, sing the songs, or chant the poems, or dance 
the dances appropriate to the place and things, the 
season and time of life, they will make a healthful, 
natural, happy progress and growth toward even 
the highest standards of intellectual and moral 
accomplishment, with far greater certainty and com- 
fort and just as rapidly as under our present, un- 
natural indoor, forcing system. 

Until, however, this educational millennium comes, 
and the education of a child is adjusted to his 
growth needs — making the great outdoors his 
schoolroom, teaching hand and foot and eye and 
body in the sun and the wind, the fields and the 
streams, with excursions to shop and factory and 
museums and places bustling with the world's work, 
all in the companionship of its own kind and with 
sympathetic supervision — we can do much to adjust 
him to the school and to watch out for signs of 
friction and pressure. 

The first and most significant sign is the appetite. 
Any child that does not eat, and eat at least once 



98 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

a day, like a saw-mill, *with eagerness, avidity, and 
an audible noise, unless restrained, is not healthy. 
He ought not to eat like a pig, of course, but he 
should want to. Similarly, a child that is fussy 
and particular — finicky — in regard to the kind 
and appearance of his food, and with more dis- 
likes and antipathies than likes, is not in a normal 
condition and cannot grow properly until his squeam- 
ishness is corrected. This can often be done by 
giving him real foods, such as his instincts call for, 
cooked in an appetizing manner but very fre- 
quently the lack of appetite has nothing to do with 
his food or his digestion as such, but is caused by 
over confinement indoors or by lack of sleep. If 
your child has no appetite, do not fuss at him or 
pile things on his plate or try to tempt his appetite 
with dainties; send him to get one — to the woods, 
or the garden, or, if necessary, to the gutter — 
anywhere where he will meet other young animals, 
human and otherwise, and roll and tumble and fight 
with them. Pay no attention to his school hours 
meanwhile — he will catch up all the ground he has 
lost and make much faster progress when he gets 
to eating properly and growing once more. If this 
prescription fails, look carefully into the amount 
of sleep the child is taking. If this, at his age, be 
less than ten hours of sound, solid, unbroken sleep, 
and especially if the child be thin and nervous and 
excitable, unhappy unless he is perpetually doing 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 99 

something, and driving eagerly from one thing to 
another, then devote your energy to seeing that he 
gets all the sleep that he can possibly be induced to 
take in the twenty-four hours. No child ever yet 
slept too much, and it is little short of crime to make 
any child get out of bed in the morning until he is 
widely and vividly awake — indeed, until you 
cannot keep him under the bedclothes any longer. 
Make him lie in bed every morning until ten or 
eleven o'clock if necessary. Put him to bed again 
at any time that he appears to be fretful, or cross, 
or tired, or dissatisfied with his surroundings and 
himself, and get him to bed by at least eight or 
half-past in the evening; and you will be surprised 
how he will plump out and his nerve tantrums sub- 
side and his appetite come back 

Peculiarities, oddities, and crankiness of dis- 
position in children should be watched for with a 
vigilant eye. The natural, healthy child is a sunny, 
even-tempered, easily pleased, happy-go-lucky little 
mortal; and when he begins to be difficult to get 
along with, it is a sign neither of original sin nor 
of pure perversity, but of something fundamentally 
wrong. It may be, of course, that you are setting 
him a bad example. If so, you cannot stop it any 
too soon. Nine times out of ten, however, bad 
temper, waywardness, fretting, and uncertainty 
of disposition in children are the symptoms of some 
disease or disturbance of nutrition. Look well to 



ioo WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

their appetite, their food, their sleep, their eyes, 
their ears, their teeth, and you will usually find the 
cause of their "fractiousness" in some one of these. 
In a small but very important percentage these 
peculiarities of temper, fits of crying on slight provo- 
cation, tendency to mope by themselves and avoid 
other children, morbid conscientiousness, worry 
over little details of work or play, and above all 
things early piety, are signs of a deeper inherent 
defect of disposition and balance, which, if un- 
checked, may result in some definite form of perma- 
nent mental disturbance. Eight tenths of those 
who become insane in later life were "peculiar" as 
children. Fortunately, at least three fourths of 
those who are born with a tendency to lack of 
balance can be trained and educated to overcome 
it. The prevention of insanity should begin before 
the seventh year. Fully one half of the household 
discomforts and family difficulties and unhappiness 
in later life are due to the neglect or injudicious 
treatment of little, inborn peculiarities of this sort 
which, though they have never gone the length 
of complete unbalance, were not trained out or 
corrected in childhood. This sort of latent insanity 
and eccentricity causes as much suffering and un- 
happiness to humanity as any known vice; and it 
is most likely to occur in the children of the over- 
pious, the unnecessarily good, and the disgracefully 
rich. 



FEEDING THE HUMAN CATERPILLAR 101 

As during the child's larval stage in the nursery, 
so now during his caterpillar one in the kindergarten, 
the best physical test that can be applied is to weigh 
him at least once in two months. If he is not gaining 
steadily in either weight or height, and generally 
both, there is ground for investigation of his con- 
dition and habits. Sometimes children, particularly 
at this age, will grow fairly rapidly in height with 
comparatively little gain in weight by a curious 
sort of readjustment of their already acquired bodily 
substance — taking it from their breadth, as it 
were, to add to their length. But even this should 
not be allowed to occur for more than six months 
at a time without relieving the child in every possible 
way from any pressure of school, or of regularity 
of hours according to any fixed scheme which he 
may happen to be under. 

Another thing to be watched closely is the ex- 
pression and colour of the child. A healthy, growing 
child is happy, most of his waking hours, and looks it. 
A child whose eyebrows are knitted in a perpetual 
frown generally has eye trouble, or headache due 
to digestive trouble, or lack of sleep, or perhaps nasal 
obstruction. Habits of scowling or looking care- 
worn should be promptly referred to the family 
physician. If the child has a frequently opened 
mouth or even, without this, has thickened or hang- 
ing lips, which are cracked in the morning, with 
small nostrils and a vacant, heavy expression, 



102 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

adenoids would at once suggest themselves, and 
should be looked for by a competent specialist. 

If a child sits about with a flushed face and either 
dull or bright eyes, half covered with drooping lids, 
holds his head as if it were a burden to him and 
mopes, it is well to suspect a fever of some sort, 
possibly only a common cold, possibly one of the 
mild infections of childhood, such as measles, 
whooping-cough, chicken-pox, or scarlatina. In 
any case, he should be given a warm bath and at 
once put to bed in a quiet room by himself, and if 
he does not fall asleep, or is not markedly better in 
six or eight hours, the family doctor should be sent 
for. No cold or fever in a child is so trifling that 
it should be neglected. Nine tenths of all the serious 
diseases and disturbances of childhood begin with 
the symptoms of a common cold, and common 
colds themselves, in the mass, cause more damage 
to hearing than all other diseases put together, and 
as many injuries to the heart, kidney, liver, and 
nervous system. A stitch in time here saves not 
merely nine but ninety. 



CHAPTER VII 

OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 

A MAN is known by the teeth that he keeps. 
The worst thing that can happen to our 
L teeth is for them not to have enough to 
do — it is the worst thing that can happen to us 
also. Spiritualized and cultured as we have become, 
we still fight the battle of life with our teeth, though 
we no longer chew our enemies' ears or throats. In 
the beginning, the mouth made the face. Where it 
was located began the head-end of the organism, 
then the smelling department settled itself just 
above it, the lookout department just above that, 
the ears next, and finally the brain to boss the whole. 
The mouth already has done as much for the race 
in the prehistoric period as the sounds which issue 
from it have done since. The psalmist who said, 
"Keep thy mouth with diligence," was a good 
dentist as well as a sound philosopher. If he 
had added, and with a tooth brush, he would have 
been strictly up to date. 

Our teeth still make our expressions, give to our 
faces the air of firmness or weakness, determi- 
nation or irresolution, make their shape oval, tri- 

103 



104 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

angular, or square, give us the wolfish, the rabbit- 
like, the horse-like, or the bull-dog expression. 
Many of our most important expressions are teeth 
expressions. When we smile we show all our pearly 
weapons resting peacefully in the sheath, as it were; 
all our cards are on the table; there is no knife up our 
sleeves and no whiskers to deceive you. When we 
frown, we inevitably clench our teeth together and set 
our jaws, as if we were locking them in the body of 
the enemy. When we sneer, we wrinkle up one side 
of our upper lip to bare the big ivory dagger, our 
canine tooth, or rather the place where we used to 
carry it. 

Is it any wonder that when such foundation 
stones of the body go wrong the whole body ma- 
chine is jarred askew? Bone cored, enamel coated 
and rock ribbed as the hills, as they are, they are 
more absolutely under our control than almost 
any other structure in the body. Neglect them, 
and they decay at once. Give them proper atten- 
tion and they will keep on repairing themselves for 
forty, fifty, sixty years. The first thing is to give 
them plenty to do, for more reasons than one. 
Poor food means poor teeth. Look at them with 
a biologist's eye, and you will see that they con- 
tain samples of every known kind of teeth possessed 
by any animal — incisors, canines, premolars and 
molars, flesh-eating, grain-eating, nut-eating, fruit- 
eating, carnivorous, herbivorous and omnivorous. 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 105 

Moral : Give them all something to do and 
often! 

Savage teeth are better than civilized in early- 
life because they get more to do, from cleaning fish 
and killing snakes and chewing walrus hide to 
gnawing off roots and digging for grubs in rotten 
logs. They decay, however, sooner than ours do, 
because the food supply is scant and coarse and 
uncertain. 

Give children plenty "of roughening" to chew, 
which Heaven knows they are willing enough to do 
— and they will get the pearly vigour of the savage 
tooth with the endurance of the Caucasian's. Above 
all, the food should be of such a character as to give 
exercise and massage to the gums. Part of this 
can be given by plenty of coarse food — in addition 
to real food, not as a substitute for it — and part 
by intentional and vigorous friction with the tooth 
brush. To brush the gums well is half the value 
of brushing the teeth. 

The next thing is to keep them thoroughly clean 
and leave no particles of food between them to 
decay; and in the process give off acids and enzymes, 
which attack and eat into the teeth. The mouth 
makes a beautiful hot house for "bugs" of all sorts, 
but they have got to have something dead to live 
on. If the gums and teeth are kept thoroughly 
alive and vigorous, they can get little foothold, but 
if some carrion in the shape of scraps of food be 



106 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

left them to form a nest in, then they can develop 
a vigour which will enable them to attack the 
teeth and gums. The food most likely to set up 
this dangerous kind of "bug breeding" is starch, 
because the fluids produced by its fermentation 
are acid, while those produced by the decay of 
meat are alkaline and have little injurious effect 
upon the teeth or gums, though they are more 
offensive to taste and smell. 

Every animal, man included, hangs on to existence 
by his teeth. If you know the teeth, you know the 
animal. We talk of the value of art as a means of 
self-expression, but it is not to be mentioned in the 
same day of the week from this point of view. 
There is, however, the "Alice in Wonderland" 
question which has been gravely propounded 
throughout the centuries with regard to mind, 
whether the man expresses himself in his teeth, 
or the teeth express themselves in the man. They 
certainly have a large share in determining his 
expression in the facial sense. Our jaws are sim- 
ply arches of gristle, hardened by deposits of lime, 
a la coral reef, into bone for the purpose of carry- 
ing and socketing our teeth. 

The feeble, retreating, sheep-like chin, the weakly 
amiable, rabbit-like, projecting upper jaw and lip, 
the rounded angles of the jaw in the child and 
woman, and the square bull-dog projection of the 
man of grit and aggressiveness are all alike func- 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 107 

tions of the size and shape of the teeth that they 
have to carry. 

The loose wrinkled lips, baggy cheeks and sloping 
angles of the jaw of the old man or old woman, 
which give such an air of collapse and indecision to 
the countenance, are due to the absorption of the 
bone from the loss of the teeth and the wasting 
away of the bony grip-hold of the great Masseter 
muscles. 

The enormous importance and significance of 
the animal's teeth need of course no argument. 
No other single feature is so illuminating as to his 
character and habits, nor so universally relied on 
for purposes of classification. The reason of 
course is obvious. For when you look at an 
animal's teeth you can tell not only what kind of 
food he eats, but how he catches it and kills it and 
also how he defends himself against attack. That 
animals which have huge, sabre-like canines, small 
incisors, and jagged, saw-tooth molars and pre- 
molars live upon flesh which they capture alive, 
and defend themselves from attack with their 
teeth, is of course as obvious as that two and two 
make four. On the other hand, some animals have 
lost or dwarfed their canine daggers, broadened 
their molars, or grinding teeth, into veritable mill- 
stones, and retained their incisor teeth in only the 
lower jaw, cutting their grassy and leafy foods with 
the chisel-like edge of these against a cartilaginous 



108 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

pad in the upper jaw, like the sheep and the cow. 
Evidently these animals do not live upon flesh, or 
catch their prey struggling and alive, or fight with 
their teeth, but with horns which have developed 
for that purpose. 

In short, so exquisitely are the teeth of an animal 
adapted to his vital demands and his habits that 
a whole animal can be reconstructed from the dis- 
covery of a single tooth. This has been done 
repeatedly by paleontologists, and the fossil of the 
remainder of the animal, afterward found, fitting 
the description in every important detail. 

Though our own teeth have been built up in 
every line and detail upon precisely the same prin- 
ciples and by the same methods of response to de- 
mands as obtain all through the animal kingdom, 
they are no longer of such dominant and exclusive 
vital importance. For ever since we assumed the 
erect position and left our forepaws free to hurl 
the spear and swing the club and grasp the tool, 
free from the dull mechanical duty of propping or 
supporting the body, the hand has taken the domi- 
nant place as the food getter and the fighter. 

Indeed, this is precisely what has landed us in 
the trouble we imagine ourselves to be in as regards 
our teeth. The developments of the hand have 
enabled us to outlive our teeth. Only that is the 
sole reason why there is so much wailing over 
their alleged decadence. If we simply peacefully 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 109 

died in times of famine, when our teeth became 
bad, as we used to all through the stages of savagery 
and the earlier ones of barbarism, we should have 
had comparatively little need for the dentist. But 
we don't seem to take kindly to the idea of solving 
the problem in this way. 

We have as perfect and lasting a set of teeth as 
any animal living. Only we don't give them enough 
exercise in the first place, and insist on outliving 
them in the second, and then turn round and 
blame them. Our impressions about some things 
are most extraordinary and naive. We are quite 
sure, because we have suffered from toothache and 
had gumboils and cavities come in our teeth, that 
there is something peculiarly rotten in this human 
"state of Denmark" that is to be found nowhere 
else in the animal world. 

But this is simply and solely because we have 
never been a dog, or a cat, or a horse, or a rabbit. 
Every known form of disease of the human teeth 
is to be matched or paralleled in some form of 
animal. Any veterinarian will tell you that, next 
to the hoofs, the part of a horse that gives him the 
most trouble is the teeth. Any dog fancier can 
relate to you histories of abscesses of the gum, 
loosenings and sheddings of the teeth, ulcerated 
gums, gumboils, etc., in his canine pets and charges, 
by the dozen and the score. 

Nearly all wild animals when confined in zoo- 



no WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

logical gardens are apt to develop trouble with 
their teeth, and iron instruments — or more prop- 
perly, machines, like those used for pulling up 
stumps by the roots in clearings — have to be 
invented for extracting the teeth of elephants and 
rhinoceroses. Whenever a particular beast, tiger 
or camel, mongoose, zebra, tapir or what not begins 
to show signs of restlessness and cry out with pain, 
the first thing the keeper suspects is the tooth- 
ache. Precisely to what extent these conditions 
occur in the wild state we do not know, for the 
obvious reason that so few wild animals come to 
any post mortem table, except that of the stomachs 
of their natural enemies. 

Diseases of the teeth and jaws are found in almost 
every variety of wild animal in a state of captivity. 
These, however, are not as frequent as under domes- 
tication or civilization, partly of course from the grim 
reason that whenever an animal reaches a certain de- 
gree of disability in its teeth it is apt to either starve 
to death or to become so much weakened by star- 
vation as to be readily captured by its pursuers. 

Zoologists, veterinarians and breeders of pet stock 
agree that nearly all varieties of animals suffer 
much from diseases of the teeth, and would develop 
them in almost as high a degree as man if they were 
placed in an environment that protected them from 
starvation on the one hand and destruction on the 
other, when their teeth fail them. 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE in 

Another thing which we have universally and 
commonly taken for granted, upon utterly insuf- 
ficient foundation, is that modern teeth are becom- 
ing degenerate, are giving way under the strain of 
civilization, and are far worse than those of the 
savage. This discouraging conclusion is based upon 
a number of considerations, most of which have 
the same broad and substantial foundation, and 
that is our massive and exhaustive ignorance of 
the actual facts. 

The supporting facts commonly cited are: 

First, that our teeth are decaying earlier and more 
frequently than they did a few generations ago; 
that we support at least five times as many dentists 
as we used to, and that our teeth must be going to 
decay, first, because we take so much of their proper 
work from them by mincing and cutting our food, 
and, second, that we overheat them with hot bever- 
ages and dishes, or injure them by cold drinks or 
creams — according to the prejudice of the observer. 

Scarcely one of these alleged "facts" has a leg to 
stand on, when we come to examine it scientifically: 
First, for the broad and conclusive reason that we 
have absolutely no accurate data as to the condition 
of the teeth two or three generations ago, the diseases 
of teeth in savages, or the actual effects upon our 
teeth of the strains to which they were submitted 
in savagery, and those to which they are sub- 
mitted in civilization. In fact, most of the ac- 



ii2 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

curate data that we possess point in the direction of 
the same conclusion as regards animals' teeth, and 
that is that the modern tooth is in no important way 
inferior to any other human tooth that has preceded 
it. But here up will go hands and eyebrows of 
remonstrance at once. For have not all of our 
travellers, explorers and other writers of fiction 
commented on the "gleaming ivories" of the negro, 
and the broad, healthy white teeth of the Indians, 
Malays and uncivilized races generally? This may 
be admitted at once, and we will volunteer the further 
information that one of the criteria of classification 
of human races is the size of their teeth, particu- 
larly of the front or incisors. This divides them 
into three groups, called megadont, mesodont and 
Microdont (big- teeth, middle- teeth and small- teeth), 
with the savages in the big-teeth class. 

However, both of these statements are based on 
misconceptions, the first of which you can readily 
test for yourself, if you are sufficiently interested to 
do so, by asking the first negro of your acquaintance 
that you meet to let you look at his teeth. Your 
first impression will be that he has unusually broad, 
white, ivory-like teeth. The first part of this is 
correct: they are broad. The second, however, is 
chiefly due to the contrast with his black or coffee- 
coloured skin. And when you get him to open his 
mouth and evert his lips so as to throw his teeth 
simply into contrast with the red mucus membrane 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 113 

you will see that in eight cases out of ten, instead of 
being whiter than your own, they are yellow. And 
this is even more strikingly true of Indian and 
Mongolian teeth, both of which are megadont. 

As to the second impression, that the teeth of 
the savage are comparatively free from disease 
because he lives a natural life and uses them vigor- 
ously, this is simply part of the ancient "noble 
savage" delusion. Any dentist who has practised 
extensively in the South, or in any place where there 
are considerable numbers of negroes, will tell you 
that their teeth are frightfully subject to diseases 
of all sorts, just like their white neighbours. Grant- 
ing this, it may of course be retorted that this is 
due to the abnormal condition of civilization under 
which they have been compelled to live. But here 
comes in another line of evidence, and that a rather 
unexpected one. 

It has been a matter of common observation 
among anthropologists and anatomists that the 
teeth of the skulls contained in the various collections 
in the Continental and other museums, and those 
examined in the catacombs and other burying 
grounds, were very frequently missing or diseased. 
But it was only some fifteen or twenty years ago 
that expert dentists began to pay attention to this 
problem. One of these, since dead, Doctor Patrick, 
of Bellville, 111., examined a large series of skulls of 
alleged Mound Builders and other American Indian 



ii 4 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

tribes with reference to the condition of their teeth, 
with the astonishing result of finding first every 
known disease and deformity of the teeth present 
which is to be discovered in civilization. Decay of 
the teeth themselves, abscesses of the gums, wasting 
away of the gums with loss of the teeth, which had 
evidently occurred in life, malocclusions and mal- 
formations of all sorts were not only present, but 
occurred in as large percentages as are found in 
civilized mouths to-day. There is little new under 
the sun, after all. 

Next, as to the number of dentists that we support : 
This is so ancient and obvious a delusion that it is 
scarcely necessary to more than refer to it, as it 
would apply equally logically to the number of 
doctors, of lawyers, of policemen, of spectacles that 
are worn, of baths, of sewers, and in fact of all the 
developments of civilization. It is now universally 
proven that the civilized man is healthier, longer 
lived, bigger, more law-abiding, less criminal, 
cleaner, and in every way better than he was even 
a hundred or two hundred years ago. Dentists 
and doctors are now devoting fully one third of their 
time to the protection and improvement of human 
health and life, and it will not be long before they 
are devoting the majority of their time to this 
purpose instead of mere cure or repair. As to the 
idea that dentists are in any sense a modern inven- 
tion, there could be few things more ludicrous 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 115 

Almost every race which has risen above the level 
of barbarism and many still in stages of savagery, 
have more or less crude methods of repairing or sub- 
stituting teeth. Fillings of various kinds of metal, 
pegs of ivory and of bone are to be found in the 
teeth of barbarous races from almost the very dawn 
of history, while all the civilizations of antiquity 
had quite elaborate and successful systems of den- 
tistry, both extractive and constructive. Further- 
more, the traditions of all the savage tribes are full 
of references to various diseases of the teeth. Long- 
fellow, in his ballad of "Mog Megone," asks the 
question : 

And is the Sachem angry with Ruth 
Because she cries with a pain in her tooth, 
Which would make a Sagamore jump and cry, 
And look about with a woman's eye? 

With a foot-note to the effect, that, stoical as the 
Indian was in the endurance of pain, and high as a 
point of pride as he placed it not to display any signs 
of such, the one exception was pain of the toothache. 
The warrior of renown might be permitted to wince 
and even cry out loud, under this agony, without 
losing his reputation for manliness and courage. 

A similar set of misconceptions is found to underlie 
two other popular beliefs on this question: That 
the diseases of the teeth are peculiarly the diseases 
of civilization, because they occur chiefly in the 
upper or wealthier classes of the community; and 



ji6 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

that American teeth are peculiarly subject to decay, 
as compared with those of the European nations. 
Ever since dental clinics began to be established in 
connection with our hospitals and dental schools, 
for the free treatment of diseased conditions of the 
teeth, it has been abundantly demonstrated that 
these conditions are not only no less frequent among 
the lower or poorer classes than the higher, but 
that they are even more so, on account of the poor 
food, bad housing and utter lack of hygienic care 
of the mouth. 

Our ignorance of the diseases of the savage and 
of the slum dweller was, up to twenty or thirty years 
ago, almost equally profound and complete. As 
to the badness of American teeth, it is true that there 
are far fewer dentists in Europe per thousand of 
the population, and that fewer people there wear 
artificial teeth, but this is simply due to the higher 
standards of efficiency and perfection of our dental 
apparatus demanded on this side of the Atlantic. 
Men and women of abundant means and good 
social position can be seen daily on the other 
side of the Atlantic, going about with a mouthful of 
teeth that an American hired girl wouldn't put up 
with. 

So that, after a careful review of all the evidence 
pro and con, we are, I think, justified in the consoling 
assurance that the civilized child, our child, starts 
out in life with as good a set of chewing tools as any 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 117 

other species of animal, or any other race or con- 
dition of men in the world. 

The problem is how to preserve his birthright. 
The first thing to be remembered is that it isn't 
necessary to assist the teeth in any way. All that 
they require is a fair field and no favours, and a 
chance to help themselves. They will sprout 
through the gums as irresistibly and inevitably at the 
proper period as the blade of grass will push its 
way up through the soil in the spring. There is a 
story of an individual who had had many ad- 
ventures with wild animals in strange countries y 
and had been lionized until he was rather sick of it. 
His most admired feat was an imitation of the cries 
of the different wild animals that he had met. And 
almost everywhere he was invited he was sure, 
sooner or later, to be called upon for this imitation. 
Being naturally a modest man, he tried to get out of 
this display in every way possible, but, finding his 
protests of no avail, he hit upon a plan to end 
this buffoonery by diplomatic means. 

At a largely attended social function, of which he 
was literally the "lion" in more senses than one, at 
an appropriate time in the proceedings his hostess 
begged him as a special favour to give one of his 
superb imitations of the wild animals at night. 
He consented with suspicious promptness, and began 
with the hooting of the owl. This was wonderfully 
realistic and much applauded. The scream of the 



n8 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

panther. This made several of the ladies in the audi- 
ence shudder. The roar of the lion, a thunderous 
volume of sound that sent the small children 
scuttling to hide their heads in their mothers' 
dresses. Then the noise of the grass growing — an 
even more thunderous roar. 

In a perfectly healthy child, the teeth will produce 
just about as much pain as the grass will make noise 
in growing. If he has any trouble with them at all, 
or even becomes aware, or makes his mother or 
nurse aware, that he is cutting them, except by the 
sight of their ivory gleam as they appear through 
the gum, it is either because his digestion is in bad 
condition from improper food, or he is suffering from 
some mild infection, or because he has bruised his 
gums upon the ridiculous objects of stony hardness, 
like ivory, coral, etc., which he has been given to 
"cut his little tussy-pegs on. " Most of the disturb- 
ances of digestion, the rashes, fretfulness and 
broken sleep, which are attributed so confidently by 
Sarah Gamp and her descendant's to teething, are 
due to errors in diet, to the various kinds of solid 
food which the child is just beginning to display an 
appetite for; to irritation from the filthy and 
often infected fingers which are thrust into his 
defenceless mouth, to see if the teeth are coming 
through, or to the slight infectious diseases, 
colds, etc., which he begins now to be peculiarly 
liable to. 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 119 

The best remedy is the proper regulation of his 
diet and bowels by competent advice, letting his 
gums and mouth severely alone, except to allow plenty 
of cool, pure water and a proper supply of food that 
contains elements upon which he can give his jaws 
the exercise they are beginning to crave. The 
effects of teething-rings, corals, "comforters," and 
all artificial objects on which the gums are to be 
exercised and the teeth to be cut, are almost ex- 
clusively bad. If they are hard, they bruise and. 
injure the delicate gums of the child. Whether 
hard or soft, they get him into the bad habit of 
perpetually wanting to have something in his mouth 
to mumble or chew at. They are continually being 
dropped on the floor, used to curry the dog and 
stroke the cat, smeared over everything that comes 
within reach, and then thrust promptly back to the 
mouth again. As germ collectors, they have few 
equals, and no superiors. Let the child get the 
exercise for his jaws which he begins to crave eagerly 
at this time, from tough and resisting articles of 
food, such as crusts, pieces of tough meat, or meat 
gristle, which are too large for him to swallow; or the 
round end of a chicken or mutton bone, with some 
fragments of meat attaching to it. All of these are 
entirely free from objection on the grounds of in- 
digestibility, since meat in all its forms can be 
digested by the infant's stomach from the earliest 
stages, being simply another form of milk. And the 



120 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

starch in the crust of bread has already been 
dextrinized by the heat. 

Supposing that the child has been placed upon the 
proper diet, both as to balance of different food 
elements, and as to offering the proper amounts of 
exercise to his gums and budding teeth, and guarded 
as far as may be against putting filthy or infected 
objects into his mouth, the next most important 
consideration is to keep his nostrils clear of ob- 
struction, so as to prevent his becoming a mouth 
breather. 

Colds and snuffles in a child should always be 
treated by competent hands. If this be thoroughly 
done, there will be far less likelihood of his develop- 
ing post-nasal growths, or adenoids. These latter 
growths are far the commonest cause of deformities 
of the jaw, irregularities of the teeth, and disturb- 
ance of proper masticating relations between the 
upper and lower jaws. Further than this, by caus- 
ing the child to breathe through the mouth they put 
the mucous membrane of the lips and the gums in a 
much more exposed condition, so that an irritated 
and congested condition of it is readily produced, 
while at the same time it is much more exposed to 
the attack of infectious germs and all the various 
filth bacteria. 

If your child shows any signs of wanting to breathe 
through the mouth, or to suck his thumb, or to get 
the corner of the blanket or the sheet into his mouth 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 121 

at night, by all means have him examined by a 
competent dentist or physician, or both, to see if his 
nasal passages are obstructed. If this obstruction 
be not removed, narrowing of the arch of the jaw, 
and disturbances of the alignment of the teeth are 
almost sure to follow. 

Next in order is the proper toilet of the mouth. 
This should begin long before the teeth appear, 
in a thorough washing out of the mouth with cool 
water, to which has been added a little mild local 
antiseptic or a little soda, after each nursing, 
and later, after each meal. Then when the teeth 
come, they should be systematically brushed after 
each meal, with a small soft brush. As soon as 
any considerable number have appeared, so that 
serious chewing of the food can be carried out, it is 
advisable to brush not merely the teeth, but the 
gums as well. And this becomes more and more 
important as the age advances. The one disad- 
vantage at which our teeth are placed under civili- 
zation, is that so much work usually performed by 
them in cutting into bits, tearing and grinding the 
food, is now carried out in the kitchen and in the mill. 

Oddly enough, it is not the most exposed part of 
the teeth which is their weakest point. The crown, 
or visible portions which do practically all the work 
of biting, grinding, etc., have been insured against 
damage these millions of years past by a coating of 
enamel, or animal glass. This is one of the toughest 



122 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and most resisting substances in nature, being ab- 
solutely unaffected by any acids except those which 
will etch upon glass, and harder than any substances 
with which it is normally brought in contact, so that 
it will be chipped or scratched by nothing short of 
steel, or pieces of grit. The point where our teeth 
begin to decay is not where they are hardest worked, 
on their grinding or cutting surfaces, but below 
these, just where the edges of the gums touch them, 
at what is known as the "neck" of the tooth. Here 
is the weak spot, like the well-known one on the 
hull of the battle ship, between wind and water, 
where the armoured coating of the enamel no longer 
protects, nor does the bony socket of the gum reach 
up far enough to cover it. The other weak spots 
are the adjacent surfaces of the teeth where food 
debris can accumulate between them and the bot- 
toms of the grooves on their grinding surfaces. The 
spots, in fact, where neither food, cheeks nor tongue 
can rub and burnish them. 

One of the chief problems of modern preventive 
dentistry is to keep this lining margin of the gum 
both healthy and firmly and closely applied to the 
necks of the teeth. This process is largely brought 
about in animals by the coarseness and hardness of 
the food which they masticate, the tough leaves 
and grass and grain of the herbivora, providing a 
steady and constant massage of the gums, as well 
as the exercise for the crowns of the teeth themselves. 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 123 

In the carnivora, the gnawing and rasping of the 
flesh away from the bones produces a tremendous 
amount of pressure upon, and what looks like 
really destructive violence to, the gum. This is 
one of the reasons why babies, kittens and young 
lions and tigers in captivity will do so badly if they 
are not well supplied with bones to gnaw at. But 
where all our starch food is both ground and cooked 
and much of it reduced to a pulp before it is put 
into the mouth, and our meat has its gristle trimmed 
off, its bones carefully cut out, and very often its 
fibres minced up into a pulp before it is put into 
the mouth at all, it is obvious that the chewing of 
our food, even if sufficiently thorough and pro- 
longed, can give little or no vigorous stimulation to 
and massage of the gums. To furnish this is one of 
the principal functions of the tooth brush. And 
one of the modern schools in the dental profession 
now declares that it is even more important to brush 
the gums than to brush the teeth. Nor do they 
base it upon merely theoretic grounds. They have 
the fact accomplished to support their conclusion. 
Their claim is, and they have cases to prove it, that 
a child who has been properly fed upon milk and 
solid foods such as crusts, meat, hard biscuit, celery, 
apples, not slops or puddings, whose mouth has 
been protected from unnecessary external infection, 
whose jaws have been kept symmetrical and well 
developed by keeping the nasal passages clear, 



124 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

can be brought through the period of the milk 
teeth, their supplanting by the permanent teeth, 
and the complete development of the latter, not 
only without toothache, or gumboil, but without 
the appearance of more than two or three cavities 
in even the milk teeth. Once launched in life with 
such a set of teeth as this, our health prospects 
are most encouraging. 

Having once fairly ushered the permanent teeth 
upon the stage in good, workmanlike condition, 
at say fifteen or sixteen years of age (the so-called 
" wisdom teeth" do not count, being remainders 
left over from a previous stage of existence, real 
"intimations of immortality"), an interesting prob- 
lem confronts us: What have we most to dread? 
The natural wear and tear of life and inherent 
tendency to decay, or the attack of disease? 
Here we land in the centre of a three-cornered field 
of battle from which the smoke has not yet suffi- 
ciently lifted to enable us to determine the issue. 
On the one hand, we have a minority of authorities 
who declare that on account of the inadequate 
amount of work left to be done by the teeth, the 
injudicious diet of civilization, and the general 
wear and tear of our modern struggle for existence, 
our teeth are doomed to decay, and carry the seeds 
of their own destruction, as it were, within them, 
like the "original sin" of the older theologies. 

This position, however, has been pretty thoroughly 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 125 

undermined, as we have already seen, except to 
the extent that it would appear probable that, 
since the average duration of savage life was under 
thirty years, and the average longevity even of 
civilized races has barely reached forty, nature, with 
her wonderful instinct for economy, is not going to 
waste time and material in manufacturing teeth 
which will last very much longer than the time 
for which they are likely to be wanted. As with 
our eyes, she will allow a leeway of say twenty-five 
to fifty per cent., and this would carry us to about 
the forty-fifth year as the period beyond which we 
have little right to expect our teeth to remain in 
good working condition. 

The question, however, is still open to experiment, 
inasmuch as no considerable number of individuals 
have yet been carried through to that period with 
such scrupulous toilet of the mouth as to have 
avoided even a majority of the preventable diseases 
and injuries to the teeth and jaws. Teeth that have 
been kept in perfect condition up to say thirty-five 
years of age will probably be "good for" twenty or 
even thirty years longer. However, we need not 
be much surprised at anything which happens to 
our teeth after forty-five or fifty years of age, or 
bear any grudge against nature on that account. 

This clears the field for the other two opposing 
armies to fight out their duel. This is hotly con- 
tested, one side holding that most of the erosions, 



126 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

cavities and inflammations about the roots of the 
teeth and the gums are local diseases, due to the 
attack of different disease germs, which can be almost 
completely prevented by skilled local treatment and 
strict attention to the toilet of the mouth and asep- 
sis generally. The other side holds that, while 
the gradual processes of decay, of ulceration and 
of erosion are participated in by bacteria, diseased 
conditions, or lowered states of vitality of the teeth 
and gums, due to morbid conditions of the digestion, 
blood and general system are the primary cause, 
and enable bacteria to gain a foothold and do their 
deadly work. 

Both positions appear to have much to support 
them, and the truth, as usual, probably lies between 
the two. But at present survey, the heavier ar- 
tillery appears to be on the side of the localists. 
To this extent both of them agree, and it is a good 
basis of encouragement for those who have teeth but 
fear that they must " prepare to shed them now," 
that a very large share of the ills to which our teeth 
are liable are due to the attack of definite and pre- 
ventable disease. It is not too much to say that by a 
strict and careful attention to the toilet of the mouth, 
thorough brushing and cleaning of the teeth after 
each meal and at bed time, including the gums in 
the sweep of the brush, and the use of a diet which 
is not so hashed and pulped as most of our hotel 
and boarding house cooks seem to think ideal, as 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 127 

large a share of the various forms of decay of the 
teeth and ulcerations of the gums may be prevented 
as modern sanitary measures will prevent of the 
infectious diseases. 

We are rapidly coming to regard this local care 
of the teeth from another and a somewhat unex- 
pected point of view. It has usually been assumed 
that its principal importance is in the extent to 
which it interferes with mastication. This is a 
real source of danger and, it may be pointed out, is 
one which is caused quite as much by painful, 
hollow and otherwise diseased teeth as it is by actual 
loss of grinding and cutting surface. But fully as 
important, in fact more so, from the modern point 
of view, is the extent to which these septic conditions 
of the teeth not only fail to add a sufficient amount 
of saliva to the food and carry out a sufficient amount 
of grinding but actually poison and infect it. An 
individual with an ordinary set of bad and partly 
carious teeth and spongy gums, with from one to 
a dozen pus pockets in them, is squirting into his 
food at every stroke of his jaws materials which are 
as healthful and wholesome for the peace and purity 
of his alimentary canal as so much rattlesnake 
venom. Fletcherism, with bad teeth, may mean 
the addition of some ten thousand germs per chew. 
And prolonged mastication with bad teeth can hardly 
be regarded as an unmixed blessing. When we 
further remember that Miller of Berlin, in his pains- 



i28 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

taking study of the bacteria of the mouth, isolated 
some forty different species, each of them counting 
its billions, which normally inhabited the human 
mouth, and that this includes several germs of 
putrefaction, half a dozen different kinds of ferments, 
two or three staphylococci, and not infrequently two 
or three of the streptococci, the germs of suppuration 
and blood poisoning, while in about ten per cent, of 
the mouths examined in the winter time, the pneu- 
monia germ is to be identified, and in a smaller 
percentage, a germ which can scarcely be distin- 
guished from diphtheria, it will be seen what a really 
vital problem it is to keep the portal of our ali- 
mentary canal in as nearly a healthful and surgically 
clean condition as possible. Many of the inhal- 
ation pneumonias, which follow the administration 
of ether or chloroform, are now believed to be due 
to the swarms of germs drawn into the patients' 
lungs from the cavities of the teeth, and the pockets 
of the gums. Not only so, but several of our most 
serious diseases of the alimentary canal and of 
the blood, notably the so-called "pernicious anemia," 
are now regarded by eminent authorities as caused 
by germs whose original landing place and foothold 
in the body are obtained in the mouth and gums. 

The pious men of old, who advised us to "Keep 
thy mouth with diligence, for out of it are the issues 
of life," might have added to it — "and of death." 

Many chronic dyspepsias and persistent bowel 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 129 

troubles, mysterious and obstinate anemias, to say 
nothing of chronic rheumatism and gout are kept 
up by perpetual self-infection of the stomach and 
intestines by the foul and septic discharges of de- 
caying teeth and ulcerated gums. We are even 
coming to suspect that some of our obstinate 
chronic bronchitises and winter coughs, with pro- 
fuse and foul-smelling expectorations are due to 
the inhalation of sprays of these same germs in the 
paroxysms of coughing. 

It is impossible to keep the teeth and gums too 
clean and sweet, both for their own sake and that 
of the rest of the system. Even if by so doing we 
cannot hope entirely to prevent their wearing away 
and decay, yet all that we do succeed in accomplish- 
ing is to the good from every point of view. 

As to the effect of conditions of the general health 
upon the teeth, the problem is a more difficult one. 
There is, of course, no doubt whatever that various 
diseases of the general system express themselves 
in the mouth and gums. For instance, in anemia, 
or general deterioration of the blood, the gums be- 
come pale, spongy and inclined to bleed readily. 
In lead poisoning, they become congested and swol- 
len and a bluish line, due to the deposition of sul- 
phide of lead, is formed along their margins at the 
point where they touch at the roots of the teeth. 
In children who are fed too exclusively upon ar- 
tificial and pasteurized foods, the gums become 



130 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

spongy, pale, purplish in spots, bleed readily, and 
such teeth as are present become loosened in the 
condition known as "scurvy," which used to be 
the plague of navies and sailors upon long voyages, 
until a thoroughly balanced diet with plenty of 
fresh fruits and fresh vegetables was substituted 
for the half decayed "salt horse" and hardtack diet. 

Those individuals who are subject to gouty symp- 
toms and attacks are very apt to have a peculiar 
disease of the gums and alveoli, characterized 
by suppuration about and in the roots of the teeth, 
with sinking and recession of the gums, with ulti- 
mate loosening and loss of the teeth involved. This 
is known as "Riggs' Disease" or by the appalling 
term of Pyorrhce alveolaris; though this and its 
pus absorption probably cause their gout, quite 
as much as their gout causes it. 

In short, it is becoming more and more necessary 
for the dentist to be a general pathologist and a 
trained physician, specializing in the diseases of the 
teeth; and, on the other hand, for the physician to 
have some adequate knowledge of broader aspects 
of the problems of dentistry and of the hygiene and 
pathology of the mouth. 

As to the direct influence of special diet, or par- 
ticular food for the teeth, there is war of the fiercest 
and hottest upon every hand. One school, both of 
physicians and dentists, even declares that all the 
processes of the decay of the teeth and of the sup- 



OUR IVORY KEEPERS OF THE GATE 131 

puration and ulceration of the gums are due at 
bottom to the outrageous overfeeding of our civi- 
lized diet, with the consequent production of uric 
acid and all its tribe. From the other extreme there 
comes the declaration that diet as such, or particular 
articles of food as such, have no effect whatever 
upon the teeth, except in so far as they may keep 
up or lower the general nutrition and vigour of the 
tissues, or produce disturbances of the digestion 
which will secondarily affect the teeth along with 
other organs of the body. The mass, however, of 
thoughtful practitioners of both dentistry and 
physicians, are inclined to take a middle ground. 
First of all, that the direct effect of the different kinds 
of food upon the teeth is comparatively slight, 
such influence as they may have being largely due 
to the fermentations which remnants left between 
the teeth or in hollows of the teeth, may favour or 
set up. From this point of view, meat is less dan- 
gerous than either the starches or the sugars, inas- 
much as the bacteria which can thrive in meat, set 
up for the most part alkaline fermentations which 
do not attack either teeth or gums. On the other 
hand, starchy or sugary debris left in the teeth, 
set up very promptly highly acid fermentations, 
which freely attack any exposed surfaces of the 
teeth. 

For practical purposes, nowever this difference 
may be disregarded, for the reason that neither 



132 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

starches nor meats should be allowed to remain 
lodged between the teeth. Practically all food debris 
should be vigorously brushed out or sawed out with 
dental silk, or with light touches of the toothpick 
after each meal, or by finishing each meal with a 
crust of bread, hard biscuit, stalk of celery or an 
apple, which clean the teeth better than a careless 
brushing. Secondly, they are practically in accord 
upon the ground that the effect of a particular diet 
upon the teeth is very largely due to the effect 
upon the general nutrition and digestion of the 
individual and the exercise it gives the teeth. 
Broadly speaking, then, we come back to a clear 
and common sense ground : Eat plenty of such food 
as best agrees with you, to be determined by your 
own experience and the advice of your family 
physician. Include such materials as parched 
grains, nuts, unpulped and unhashed meats, salad 
vegetables, like celery, etc., as will give the teeth 
plenty of exercise. Chew it thoroughly, but not 
to excess, and do not for a moment imagine that 
by so doing you can gain any magic, life-giving 
property, or increase its nutritive value more than 
a fraction of a per cent. 

Lastly, see that your mouth is surgically, scrup- 
ulously, aseptically clean, as nearly as it is possible, 
at least four times a day. 



CHAPTER VII 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 



THE child is born an egoist. If he was not, 
he would never survive. He is absolutely 
compelled to devote his entire time and 
attention to the business of growing up — in other 
words, to himself. But there is nothing small about 
this egoism. It includes the whole world in its 
scope — because he believes himself to be It. 
Everything is, or is not, according as it touches or 
doesn't touch him. He has no conception of 
anything outside of himself. 

Emerson simply reverted to first principles, to 
the everlasting childhood, when he said, "I am 
the Cosmos, the Universe." The child would say 
it if he could talk, or were conscious of it. 

Naturally this makes him a trifle selfish, in the 
sense of self-centred. He doesn't as yet know of 
anything else to centre about. How can we possi- 
bly expect him to recognize the rights or interests 
of individuals whose very existence he cannot yet 
conceive of? To the child under three, his devoted 
parents, his nurse, his playmates, are little more 
than so many features of the landscape. It no more 

133 



134 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

occurs to him to consider their rights or feelings, 
than it does to us grown-ups to allow the political 
rights of stumps or the fine feelings of sidewalks 
to enter into our calculations. His business is to 
grow at the expense of his surroundings, regardless 
of their feelings. If he doesn't, he is not healthy, 
and will never live to grow up. In other words, 
the child is simply provided by wise Mother Nature 
with those particular instincts and impulses, moral 
and mental as well as physical, which are needed to 
carry him through that particular stage of his growth. 
When he reaches the stage where other and broader 
instincts are needed, these also will develop. 

Egoism, "selfishness," if you like, comes first. 
Altruism, unselfishness, later, but just as inevi- 
tably. It is the failure to recognize this latter fact, 
and the attempt to inculcate kindness, gratitude, 
self-denial at the time when they are not only 
unnecessary but unnatural that has made the tragedy 
of the moral training of many a child. If a child 
wants to give up its own way, and begins to worry 
about his little sins of omission and commission 
before eight or ten years of age, and usually up to 
twelve or fifteen, there is something wrong with 
him. Take him to a doctor. 

The abnormally and precociously "good" chil- 
dren who weep over the sins of their parents, and 
pray for their little playmates, inevitably die young 
and go to heaven in the "goody-good" books. This 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 135 

is one point in which Sunday-school literature is 
true to real life. The failure to recognize the 
absolute necessity, in the broad sense, the Tightness 
and the morality of primary selfishness or absorp- 
tion in self, has been the source of half our misun- 
derstandings of the morality of the child. He is 
no simple little mass of clay or putty, for his teachers 
and parents to mould into any shape at their own 
sweet will. He is a sturdy, vigorous, growing shoot, 
with perfectly definite growth tendencies, which 
you cross at your peril, with a will of his own, and 
a definite goal toward which this tendency will 
carry him, which may even reach the level of that 
pinnacle of perfection, yourself, if you will only 
let him alone and not interfere with him too 
much. 

The child is selfish — yes, but so is a lily shoot 
green. It ought to show some little trace or tint 
of white about it if it is going in a few short weeks to 
blossom out in the spotless purity of Easter. But 
it doesn't. Yet, cut down into the heart of it, and 
there you will find folded and packed away with the 
most exquisite skill, every petal, every sepal, every 
detail of that fragrant snowy bell that thrills our 
senses like a call from another world. You will 
have to take a microscope to find some of the 
details, but they are all there. Yet when the spear 
first pushes up through the earth, you could hardly 
tell it from a head of asparagus. 



136 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

The blossom of the lily is for the continuance of 
the race, for the welfare of future generations. 
That blossom of human character which we call 
the higher morality, unselfishness, charity, is for 
the same ends and will appear, or attempt to appear, 
as inevitably at its appropriate time. To expect 
to find it full grown, or even visible in the bud, at 
a time of life when every energy is and must be 
concentrated upon the preservation and develop- 
ment of self is not only irrational but absurd. 

We do not expect paternal feelings in a child of 
five. Why, then, should we expect any other of 
those race-regarding-impulses which we term "moral- 
ity!" Even to appeal to the "better feelings" of a 
child of eight or ten, is often almost as irrational 
as the celebrated apostrophe of the emotional 
Irish barrister, who in the fine frenzy of the pero- 
ration of his plea for leniency on account of 
the gray-haired mother of the prisoner at the 
bar whirled on the Judge with the thrilling appeal: 

"Sirr! was you iver a mother!" To appeal to a 
child's better nature, while excellent in moderation, 
does little more than make a hypocrite out of him 
before his time. It is hard to get away from the 
idea that, because the child will need these altruis- 
tic qualities later in life, they must be present at the 
very, earliest stage of his existence "in the germ" 
in such a way that they can be reached and stimu- 
lated, and directly caused to develop. In nine 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 137 

cases out of ten, they are as far beyond the possibility 
of direct interference as the germ of the lily flower 
in the heart of its stalk. The only way that they 
can be stimulated to develop is by giving them a 
favourable environment. Give the soil plenty of 
nourishment and see that the sunshine and the rain 
have free access. Most of our (in the vernacular 
term) "previous" methods of inculcating morality 
and developing unselfishness, conscientiousness and 
self-denial in children are about as rational as picking 
the petals of the unfolding bud open with a pin, or 
injecting "plant-foods" into its heart with a hypo- 
dermic needle. 

He has got your hair, and his mother's eyes and 
voice, and some of your little tricks of manner — 
and temper — now, and he is just as safe to develop 
your superb self-control and civic devotion and 
consideration for others, if you will only give him 
time and set him a good example. Meanwhile, 
preaching to him that he should possess these quali- 
ties, will expedite matters precious little, and, if not 
backed up by example, not at all. Remember that 
life and growth of all sorts are but a response to 
environment, and new responses can only occur as 
opportunity is afforded for them. 

"But," says some one, "the child is born into 
precisely the environment in which he will grow up, 
which will surround him in his adult life. He is 
born into this twentieth century, where he will 



138 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

continue to live." That is precisely where we mis- 
judge. The child is not born into the twentieth 
century, but in the fortieth century B. C. He 
begins just where the race did, and he climbs every 
inch of his family tree from the grass up to the 
topmost branches. If we hope for any intelligent 
understanding of his little problems, if we are to get 
any sympathetic insight into his little heart, he must 
be regarded first as a kitten, then as a monkey, 
next as a little savage — all but the war-paint; 
then as a mixture of knight errant and free-booter; 
and last of all the sober citizen of a republic. 

He is equally charming and delightful in eacn of 
these stages, except perhaps the last. What is most 
vital of all is that each one of them is the necessary 
precursor of the next. Check the irrepressive activ- 
ity, utter irresponsibility, the merry enjoyment 
and delight, the sublime and unconscious sel- 
fishness of the kitten stage, and you stunt the 
possibilities of development of the later citizen and 
patriot. 

The child lives in a world of his own, half real, 
half imaginary. And if we would recognize this, 
and try to see things from his point of view, we would 
save ourselves a world of unnecessary worriment, and 
many a heartache. Just so surely as the child is 
wholesomely and unconsciously selfish during his 
first five years, will he develop the germs of unself- 
ishness in his third five years, under anything like 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 139 

reasonable surroundings. And all our proddings 
and preachings and scoldings will not hasten the 
process a particle, but will infinitely bewilder him 
— poor little chap ! 

Having dispassionately recognized in the dry, 
white light of science the primary and essential 
selfishness of the child, the next step is to recognize 
our own. This is often just as unconscious, and just 
as colossal. We are immensely proud of and 
devoted to this little morsel of the "bone of our 
bone and the flesh of our flesh." There is nothing 
that we wouldn't do for him — except let him live 
his own life. We lay wonderful plans for his future. 
We are going to make such and such things out of 
him. He is to carry out the plans which we had 
dreamed of for ourselves, but now despair of accom- 
plishing. A nice, cheerful encouraging prospect 
for the poor little tot, to begin with! And then be- 
cause the poor youngster begins to show definite life 
and growth tendencies of his own, which cross these 
carefully laid plans of ours, we become indignant, 
and there is trouble at once. Surely we, with our 
age and experience, must know better than he does. 
But are we so overwhelmingly sure of that? Have 
we made such a brilliant and indisputable success of 
our life and career at every point that we feel com- 
petent to take absolute and unchecked control of his? 
How much do we know that we owe to inborn qual- 
ities which we inherited directly through our parents, 



140 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and how much to their formal teaching and train- 
ing? 

What we really reverence and love in the memory 
of our parents is what they were and what they did, 
not what they taught or preached. We can see 
now that they were kindlier than their principles, 
better than their ideals, and broader than their 
creeds. If you are worthy of your child's admiration 
and imitation he will find it out without having to 
be told daily about it. If you are not — then, 
heaven help you ! For you can't hide that from him, 
by all the professions and precepts in the world. 

There is another realm in which the selfishness 
which we reprobate so severely and strive so desper- 
ately to eradicate is not confined to the child. I fear 
that most of us, as parents, will be forced remorse- 
fully to admit, if we search our own souls deeply 
and honestly enough, that, mixed with our pride 
and joy in our children, intertwined with our most 
unselfish determination to give them a great future, 
at no matter what expense of labour or privation to 
ourselves, there lurks something of a narrower sense 
of ownership, of possession, of power. Here at 
last is something that really belongs to us, that we 
can do with as we wish, and can mould according to 
our pleasure. Here is one human being who at least 
shall appreciate us at our true worth, admire 
and respect us as we deserve. Nobody else has ever 
done it yet, but that's all the more reason why he 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 141 

should. Then, when this tiny piece of ourselves, 
this mannikin that we have brought into existence, 
have nourished and supported, fails to bow down 
and worship us — how bitter the disappointment. 

When he disobeys our formal command, when he 
refuses to eat our favourite food, when he flouts 
our dearest views of life, how it hurts! Let us never 
forget, though, that the principal wound is to our 
vanity, to our self-esteem. Otherwise, why should 
we lose our temper and punish and scold him, or, 
what is almost worse in its effect upon him from sense 
of proportion and judgment, denounce him as "headed 
for a reform school, " "sure to come to some bad end, " 
or to "bring down our gray hairs in sorrow to the 
grave?" To make a child believe that he is a 
criminal and a lost soul on account of some trivial 
act of disobedience is crueler and more radically 
injurious in its effects than a thrashing. 

I am afraid that we, as parents, even the most 
conscientious, on careful analysis will find ourselves 
compelled to confess that a pitifully large share of 
the demands for obedience, or the formal discipline 
to which children are subjected in their moral 
training is based upon the half unconscious demands 
of our own vanity. People shall see that our child 
will obey us promptly, even if no one else in the 
wide world will. His bringing-up shall be a credit to 
us. And our sole aim should be, that it may be 
a credit to him. 



i 4 2 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

Probably the next charge that we hear made 
against the natural morality of the child is that he 
is "ungrateful." And to this we frankly plead 
guilty. But why? Simply because he doesn't 
know that he has anything to be grateful for, short 
of his twelfth or fifteenth year. Nor is it particu- 
larly desirable that he should. The young child 
takes everything that comes to him as a matter of 
right and of course, just as the plants do the sunshine 
and the rain and the soil in which they grow. And 
he ought to, if he is to be happy and healthy and 
growing. We know well what his birth and his 
upbringing, his care and his shelter have cost — 
in birth pangs, in toil, in anxious care, in self-denial. 
But how on earth can we expect him to realize it? 
Our conceptions are founded upon and absolutely 
limited by our experiences. Naturally his tiny past 
is utterly destitute of such experiences, or anything 
approaching them. He has, in the language of the 
pedagogists, no "apperceptive basis" for the con- 
ception of them. Why should we expect it of him ? 

It never occurs to the young child that his food, 
his clothing, his housing, or the furniture of his room 
cost money, or represent effort. And it is difficult 
even to make him believe that they do, because 
he never has occasion to purchase them for himself. 
He discovers at a very early day that his toys and his 
sweetmeats cost money, which if spent for them 
cannot be used for something, else. And for them 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 143 

he will evince a lively though rather evanescent 
gratitude. But for clothes, for school-books, bed- 
ding or table linen, not a particle. His attitude is 
shrewdly illustrated by the remark: "Don't give 
me gloves, or a fur cap, or a napkin-ring for a birth- 
day present. I'd get them anyhow. " 

He is perfectly willing to love his parents, to ad- 
mire them with an extravagance far beyond their 
deserts, to laugh at their little jokes and favourite 
stories, to accede to all of their reasonable and even 
to some unreasonable requests. But to demand 
that he should be grateful, at least for anything 
beyond "extras" and presents, simply confuses and 
puzzles him. Not even the favourite trick of com- 
paring his condition with that of slum or beggar 
children carries much conviction. He is apt rather 
to admire theadventurousnessand delightful freedom 
from fixed ties and grown-up interference generally 
exhibited in their lives, and at bottom cannot rid 
himself of the conviction that they really have by 
nature at least three square meals a day and a place 
to sleep, except at such times as they are exhibited 
hungry and shelterless for his benefit. The naive 
remark of a little French princess when told that 
the peasants throughout her father's kingdom were 
starving to death was, "Why, how foolish of them! 
I would rather eat bread and cheese first!" is 
typical of the instinctive attitude of the child 
mind. It is inconceivable to him that any nice 



i 4 4 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

little boy or girl shouldn't have plenty of unin- 
teresting plain things to eat. Scarcity is a thing 
that he can only conceive of in connection with 
caramels and ice cream sodas. And I doubt if it 
is not wiser to let that conviction remain undisturbed 
until the hard facts of experience dispel it, as they 
will, all too soon. 

Now that we have frankly admitted that the 
child is both selfish, ungrateful and often disobedient, 
it is time to set down the positive virtues that he 
possesses: In the first place, he is naturally truth- 
ful; and his instinctive inclination is to relate the 
event as it happened to him with the fidelity and 
mechanical accuracy of a reflection in the mirror. 
That is what his senses are for, to see, hear, feel 
things; his memory, to store them up; his language, 
to reproduce them afterward for his own benefit and 
that of others. It is the line not only of instinct, of 
all the impulses of past ages, but of physiological 
least resistance. Only one thing can warp this 
tendency, can divert this truth impulse, and that 
is fear. Fear, which, alas! we have too often 
ourselves introduced into his consciousness. 

That the child is by nature irrepressibly affection- 
ate, loving, full of good comradeship, calls for no 
proof to any one who knows children. He needs 
these qualities in his business, just as much as he does 
his selfishness and his aggressiveness. Millions of 
years ago it was found out by our ancestors, even 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 145 

before they came down from the tree tops, that if 
they would prosper they must have their neighbour's 
consent in the form of his good will. Though they 
hated their enemy, they must love their neighbour. 
Moreover, the time when he needed these qualities 
in the highest degree was during the early stages of 
his individual existence, in the period of infancy. 
Since the helpless infant has to be taken care of, if 
he is to survive, it is almost necessary that it should 
be plump and pink and cute, and have a lot of en- 
gaging little tricks and manners about it. And when 
all is said and done, nothing is more engaging and 
attractive, more flattering to one's self-love, than a 
display of spontaneous affection on the part of some 
other human being. 

Therefore, upon the coldest of evolutionary 
grounds, it is the business of the child to be affec- 
tionate. Of course in its earliest stages this affec- 
tionateness is like that of the flower for the sun, 
or of a kitten for cream. But it is a natural basis 
for the higher affections, for devotion, for kindliness, 
and if given anything like a favourable environment 
and a good example will develop into all of these. 
In short, our virtues are hereditary, older than we are 
as a race in fact. Our vices are acquired, a product 
of civilization, of education. 

The one thing that will make a child a liar is 
cowardice — fear of the consequences of telling the 
truth. And these consequences, nine times out of 



146 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

ten, wnich he dreads are the results of the wrath, 
more or less righteous, of those who are in authority 
over him. Now fear has unquestionably played in 
the past a large and important part as one of the 
motive forces of moral growths, as one of the in- 
fluences to be appealed to in education. "The fear 
of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, " we are com- 
placently told. But necessary and inevitable as 
this fear of the consequences is, in prompting self- 
restraint and moulding conduct, it is now univer- 
sally admitted by thoughtful teachers and parents 
that it should be restricted to as narrow limits as 
possible in the training of the young child. Cer- 
tainly no child should be made so afraid of any form 
of punishment that he will lie to escape it. 

To the unspoiled, uncowed, unterrified child it 
goes as much against the grain to tell a falsehood as 
it does to eat salt on his pudding instead of sugar. 
To invent something that didn't happen is an un- 
necessary mental effort, in the first place. In the 
second, it lands him in a lot of trouble, making this 
new creation of his square with a lot of other obsti- 
nate facts that are sure to crop up. In the third 
place, it leaves him in the uncomfortable dread of 
being found out, when he knows that with the 
exquisite logic of parental discipline he will be 
doubly punished, once for committing the offence 
and once more for lying about it. Lying is the vice 
of slaves and cowards, and your child is born a 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 147 

free man and a fighter. If he loses his heritage, it 
will be more often your fault than his. 

This is not by any means to say that a child 
will not of his own accord make a statement which 
doesn't correspond with the facts. On the contrary, 
many children are born romancers, and positively 
revel in exaggeration and the rolling forth of romantic 
adventures which could never by any possibility have 
occurred to them — unless it be in some previous 
incarnation. These little wonder-mongers have such 
fertile imaginations and envisage things so clearly 
that are told to them, and gloat so over the pictures 
of battle and adventure which are spread before 
them in their gift books, recalling every tiniest 
detail and touch of colour in that photographic 
memory of theirs, that they have, I am con- 
vinced, great difficulty, when once fairly launched 
in pouring forth their delighted memories of what 
happened to them in the enchanted wood at the 
bottom of the garden, in distinguishing between 
their memories of what really happened to them 
and their even more vivid recollections of the things 
that they have read or been told, or seen in picture 
books. The cow that actually shook its head and 
mooed ferociously at them is a recollection not a 
whit more real to them than the dragon with blazing 
scales and fiery breath who almost swallowed them 
whole for supper. 

But there is not a particle of vice in these prepos- 



148 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

terous romancings, which are obviously on the 
very face of them incapable of deceiving even the 
most gullible. They furnish one of the most de- 
lightful occupations of childhood and, for the matter 
of that, of life — and the only harm in them is in 
the mild element of boasting and braggadocio in- 
volved, and the habit of leading the child to dwell 
too much in the clouds. 

There is little fear, however, but that he will come 
to earth soon enough. Their greatest power for 
harm lies in the risk that some juiceless lath-and- 
plaster prig or moralist among the grown-ups that 
happen to surround him will choose to magnify his 
harmless vapourings into serious offences, and de- 
nounce the child as a "born little liar." Once call 
a child that, and you have gone a long way to make 
him one. So long as his romancings are indulged 
in solely for their own sake, and not for any specific, 
selfish purpose, such as to gain advantage, or escape 
a penalty, or discredit some one else, there is little 
need to worry about them. All things for him are 
bathed in the radiance of the "light that never was 
on sea or land." And the time will come all too surely 
and too soon when this will fade, and he will realize 
that there "has passed away a glory from the earth." 
Are you anxious to hasten the coming of that time? 

Let him alone, except to laugh with him at his 
illusions, and poke a little gentle fun at them and 
give him time. He will become as monotonous, 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 149 

as colourless and as uninteresting and parrot-like 
a reproducer of the dull, cold facts in the case, 
which you dignify by the term of "telling the truth, " 
as you are yourself. If you had half his imagination 
you would lie, in the sense in which you accuse him, 
nearly as often as he does, from sheer exuberance of 
spirits. 

But the greatest breeder of untruthfulness in 
young children is the habit, which, alas ! it is so easy 
to fall into, on the part of particularly careful and 
conscientious parents and guardians, of surrounding 
their every activity, their every hour of the day, 
with an elaborate network of rules and restrictions 
and precepts. Some of these, though reasonable in 
themselves, hedge the child in at so many points 
that it is scarcely in human nature to avoid con- 
flicting with them. Others are utterly absurd and 
irrational, and made by us far more out of regard 
for our own comfort and peace of mind than for the 
well-being of the child, such as many of the edicts 
against noise and boisterousness, and playing with 
water, or running on the grass, or climbing the 
trees, for fear that it will spoil his clothes. But the 
main point is that there are so many of them that 
the child can hardly even remember them all, let 
alone manage to observe them. And the chances 
are that, when suddenly pounced upon by an irate 
parent, or nurse-maid, who demands with fury in 
the eyes and sternness in the voice whether he has 



150 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

been playing in the bath-room and dropped the 
glass on the floor, or taken the salt-cellar for a sand- 
box and heaped its contents on the table-cloth, 
he is exceedingly apt, on lightning-like impulse, to 
say "No. " And when he has once said it, of course 
he is bound to stick to it from sheer perversity and 
sense of self-respect. Sometimes he may not 
even remember whether the particular offence has 
been committed. He has done so many things dur- 
ing the time which to him appeared equally natural 
and blameless that this particular offence against 
the peace of the commonwealth has not made much 
impression upon his memory. But very commonly 
I believe he will deny an accusation of this sort from 
sheer contrariness, just exactly as you would 
if some one suddenly accused you of having behaved 
in a cowardly manner, or appeared in a ridiculous 
light, or done a discreditable thing. Sometimes I 
think he has a positive sense that the action com- 
plained of was from his point of view innocent, at 
least in intention, and that it is none of your business 
to be everlastingly prying into his affairs and com- 
pelling him to give an account of everything that 
he does, or even thinks. Nothing will make a grown 
man or woman more furiously indignant, or ready to 
throw up a position quicker, than to be perpetually 
bossed and overhauled and interfered with, even 
though it be done in the friendliest of spirit. 

We ought to respect the reserve, the individuality 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 151 

and the self-respect of the child. Often a fib is 
but little more than his way of saying, "None of your 
business. " As we recognize the truth of the proverb, 
"Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies," 
between grown-ups, why not between grown-ups 
and children? Let us try and look at the matter a 
little bit from his point of view, before we give our- 
selves over to lamentations that any child of ours 
should grow up a liar. 

The child is by nature honest, brave and affection- 
ate. But how quickly these virtues develop de- 
pends much upon his environment. He is honest 
by instinct, simply because honesty and truthfulness 
mean squareness with the universe. His natural 
impulses are downright and straightforward, often to 
an embarrassing degree. The appalling frankness, 
fearless outspokenness and honesty of the enfant 
terrible have passed into a proverb. Nowhere else 
is there such a painter of 

The thing as he sees it, 

For the God of Things as they are. 

It is the conventions of society and the insincerities 
of his training which make him fear to express him- 
self, time-serving, and politic. His honesty, in the 
rational sense of regard for the rights of property, 
is also instinctive, but has its peculiarities. In the 
beginning, of course, it is naturally confined to 
respect for the rights of property of the only individ- 



152 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

ual whose existence he recognizes, and that is him- 
self. His idea of meum includes the universe as he 
knows it. But as he gradually grows to recognize 
the existence of other inhabitants on this planet 
he discovers that they too have similar rights, or, 
as he would perhaps regard them, privileges of 
possession and ownership which, however irrational 
he may consider them at first, he finds that it is the 
part of discretion to attempt, at least, to appear 
to believe in. Another step, and he finds that others 
will assist him to defend his tiny store of trappings 
and plunder against raids by a common enemy, on 
condition of his rendering similar service to them in 
a like emergency. When he has attained this, he 
has reached the full moral basis of the Sacred Rights 
of Property in this twentieth century. 

"I will respect your rights, if you will respect 
mine, in order that we may both unite to defend 
ourselves against those who haven't any rights and, 
if possible, keep them from getting any," is the 
way he would express our business morality of 
the day. 

In the beginning, of course, if he be hungry and 
sees food within his reach he will take it. But here 
he is only repeating ancient history and exercising 
rights granted by unwritten law to every child in 
primitive tribes. Only our higher civilization denies 
the child this inborn right to take food when he 
needs it. But he soon outgrows this, and finds 



THE CHILD'S SELF-RESPECT 153 

that honesty is the best policy, on the basis con- 
fessed by the Scotch elder on his death bed that he 
had "tried baith." 

The child is courageous, because it is born in 
his blood, because it has been the habit of the race 
from which he is sprung for half a million generations 
back. The instinctive attitude, the native expres- 
sion, of the child is confident, fearless. Most of 
the fear that is brought into his young life is brought 
there by our act and teaching. The ignorant, care- 
less nurse-maid to whom we entrust him in his ear- 
liest years because all he needs is "just to be kept 
out of mischief " teaches him the fear of the dark, 
through the bogies which she assures him will clutch 
him if he leaves his bed in the corner of the nursery 
while she is downstairs and out of doors amusing 
herself. 

By a similar charming mechanism, and for the 
same purpose, the woods become filled with bears 
and wolves that will devour him if he strays beyond 
the garden walls; the streets with bad men who will 
carry him off and sell him, or eat him; the streams 
with water kelpies and snakes that will pull him in 
if he so much as looks over the crystal brim. In 
other words, we deliberately try or permit him to 
be frightened into good behaviour, by peopling 
the world around, into which we do not yet want 
him to venture, with all sorts of shapes and terrors. 
Then we wonder that he is afraid of the dark and 



154 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

are most indignant with him for objecting to being 
left alone at night after he has been put to bed. 
It ought to be made a criminal offence to put these 
ideas of horror, these degrading and demoralizing 
superstitions, into the mind of a child of the twen- 
tieth century at all. 

Let the child retain his brave and beautiful con- 
fidence as long as he possibly can. Then when the 
troubles typified by these dark and gruesome tales 
of the underworld and the overworld really come 
he will have developed strength and resiliency to 
meet and bear them. But there is not the slightest 
advantage, either to morals or good common sense, 
in making him miserable over the awful things which, 
whatever we may believe about a future life, we are 
perfectly sure do not happen, and cannot exist in 
this. It is only a few centuries since grown men 
began to be free from this awful dread of impending 
evil, of a Resistless Fate, in whose clutch they were 
powerless. But we have outgrown it; and why should 
we insist on inflicting it by our own voluntary 
or permitted action upon the new generation? 



CHAPTER IX 



BRICK WALLS AND THE GROWING CHILD 



T 



HE poet assures us that 

Stone walls do not a prison make, 

Nor iron bars a cage; 
Minds innocent and quiet take 

These for a hermitage, 



Yet there is something fundamentally incongruous 
between a healthy, growing child and a room with 
four walls. Even though the window openings in 
the aforesaid walls be accurately adjusted to equal 
or even exceed one fifth of the floor space; though 
their remaining surfaces be opened to precisely 
that tint which will soothe his retina and stimulate 
his soul; though the window seats be filled with 
flowers and gold-fish bowls; though the light be 
cunningly trained to fall over the left shoulder, 
and the temperature miraculously maintained at a 
pitch of 68°, which, like the law of the Medes and 
Persians, "changeth not," yet will it remain a prison 
to the eye of the unspoiled young human animal. 
A gilded and well-ventilated cage — but a cage 
nevertheless! You may be able to make him forget 

155 



156 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

it for half an hour, or even an hour, but seldom 
beyond that. And why should you ? 
. You can tell a child in an hour more than he can 
work out, or test to his own satisfaction, in a day; 
and he can tell you all that is of importance about 
what he has done in the day before, and all the 
deductions he can profitably draw from it, in an- 
other hour. So why confine him in the schoolroom 
for longer than these two periods? He grows by 
living, and he learns by doing; neither of these can 
be done as well in the schoolhouse as elsewhere. 
Is there any good and valid reason why schooling, 
which usurps and dominates the period of our most 
rapid growth — and should be an aid to that growth 
— should be so exclusively carried on indoors? 

The trouble with institutions is that they do 
not die when the men who invented them do; and 
with buildings, that they last longer than their 
builders. Jehovah was most wise when he buried 
Moses's stone tables of the law with him, where 
nobody was ever able to find them again, and would 
not permit his chosen people to have a permanent 
building in which to worship, for eight hundred 
years. The letter always becomes stronger than 
the law that it preserves; the building greater 
than the purpose for which it was built. Our 
present system of education suffers under a positive 
obsession — a very nightmare of schoolroom. 

It must be frankly admitted that the schoolroom 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 157 

has, and always has had, two distinct functions — 
one, to keep the children out of mischief, the other 
to teach them something. The heaviest and most 
irksome part of the teacher's duty to-day is nursery- 
maid work. Schoolrooms are still places of confine- 
ment; indeed in the earlier days were more of this 
than founts of learning. In the Dames' Schools and 
Hedge Schools of a century ago luckless little tots 
were kept sitting for hours at a stretch on benches 
where their feet could not touch the ground, with 
little or nothing to do but drop asleep and fall off. 
While upon one side of its pedigree, so to speak, 
the teaching profession is of the highest and noblest 
lineage, upon the other side, alas! it harks back to 
a very different kind of ancestry — some toothless 
old crone who was too decrepit to do anything more 
strenuous than to keep the babies out of mischief; 
or some undersized weakling, or even cripple, who 
was too feeble to work in the fields, or fight in the 
wars. Of course we have long since abandoned 
this principle of selecting teachers, just as the 
English gentry no longer follow the rule that "the 
fool of the family goes into the church"; and the 
time of the children is now as fully and intelligently 
occupied as that of convicts in a model prison. 
But traces of the ancient regime still survive in the 
facts that the teaching profession is the unskilled 
intellectual labour market, and the school day is 
still planned upon the principle of covering all the 



158 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

time of the child, except the hours required for meals, 
chores and running errands, regardless of whether 
the work of education might not be better and more 
profitably done elsewhere. 

So heavily has the schoolroom obsessed us that 
the mere spending of five hours a day within its 
Sacred Walls has come to be regarded as a virtue 
and an end in itself; and the question of the new 
education is how much of the work that is now done 
in the schoolroom could be better done in the garden, 
the playground and the shop ? Its practical problem 
is how to reduce a part of the schoolroom to solely 
that portion of the work which cannot be better 
done elsewhere. And it is coming to be the con- 
sensus of opinion of thoughtful educators, of careful 
child students, as it has long been that of the 
physician and the biologist, that this would mean a 
reduction of present hours by at least one half, if 
not two thirds. 

But the question will be raised at once: How can 
we then possibly complete our inspired curriculum 
and reach our Sacred Standards at the required 
time? Surely, if a given amount of work can barely 
be done in five hours a day, only half that amount 
of work can be done in two and a half hours a day. 
This was the logic of the old education — that of 
the new is different! 

Even in the world of labour it has been dis- 
covered that the apparent paradox holds good; 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 159 

the shorter the hours, the more and the better the 
work done. The shortened schoolroom day can be 
abundantly justified on two broad grounds: First, 
that as the child's brain is part of his body and grows 
with that body and in response to its needs, what- 
ever time is necessary to keep that body healthy 
and vigorous and growing will increase the rapidity 
with which the child learns, and is to be regarded, 
broadly considered, part of his education. The 
second, or internal reason, is even more important, 
viz., — that instead of the purpose of education being 
to treat the child as if he were a bushel basket, or 
a milk bucket, and fill him up with so many quarts 
or so many gallons of information, so that his in- 
tellectual contents will reach a certain level at the 
end of each year until he is full up on Commence- 
ment Day — its real purpose is to develop the child's 
powers so that he will be able to acquire information, 
draw correct conclusions from it, and utilize it for 
himself. The best way yet devised of doing this 
is to give the child an interest in his work; to kindle 
in him, as Locke quaintly expresses it, "a liking 
for learning," so that he will continue his own 
education by his own volition, and work with his 
teachers and instructors, instead of against them. 
For the discipline and obedience of the old education, 
the new would substitute enthusiasm and initiative. 
Both of these can be cultivated far better outside 
of the schoolroom than in it. 



160 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

It is as natural for a child to learn as it is for him 
to grow; in fact it is impossible for him to grow 
without learning, though he may do certain arti- 
ficial kinds of learning without growing much. 
His desire to know is as keen as his appetite for 
food, and as insatiable. No more vivid charac- 
terization of a child has ever been sketched than 
in Kipling's charming little verse: 

I have six faithful serving men, who taught me all I knew; 
Their names are Why, and How, and What, and Where, and 
When, and Who. 

* * * * 

I know a person small, 

Who has a swarm of serving men who get no rest at all, 

She sends them abroad on her own affairs 

From the moment she opens her eyes; 

A hundred Whats, a thousand Wheres, and seven million Whys! 

He is simply an embodied interrogation point! 
Even his oft-deplored tendency to get into mischief 
is simply due to his overmastering desire to poke 
his fingers into everything, to investigate the secret 
springs and causes of their phenomenon, and live 
up to the rule of the Mongoose Family, which is, 
"Go and find out!" 

He is interested in everything about him with a 
fine indiscriminateness; things profitable and un- 
profitable, edifying and unedifying. The one prob- 
lem of the teacher is to pick out profitable sub- 
jects and direct his attention in their direction. 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 161 

If you keep him well occupied with these he will 
have little time and less inclination for unprofit- 
able and unedifying researches. Fortunately the 
things he "Wants to Know" most keenly are 
usually among the most fundamental and vitally 
important. No questions, save those of a very 
wise man, go so unerringly and directly to the 
heart of a matter as those of a child. Indeed, 
there is more than ground for suspecting that the 
old, formal cut-and-dried education was devised 
quite as much as a defence for the stupidity and 
peace of mind of the teacher, as for the benefit of 
the taught. 

Teach a child a subject out of a book, hold him 
strictly to the text and all you need to do is to 
keep a couple of pages ahead of him. Take him 
into a shop, a garden, or a laboratory, let him ask 
questions for himself and demand that your an- 
swers shall square with the facts, and he will strain 
the powers of the wisest and most resourceful. 
The education which does not develop and exer- 
cise the teacher quite as fully and vigorously as 
the taught, is built on the wrong principle! The 
school ought to be the last place where a dull or 
formal mind will find itself at home, instead of a 
restful haven for mediocrity. 

The schoolroom is the natural home of formalism 
and pedantry, the temple of the "Letter that 
killeth." It can cover profitably only a part, 



162 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and a small part, of the education of the child. 
All signs point toward the reducing of the school- 
room from its present denomination to a sub- 
ordinate place in the scheme of teaching, as the 
next great forward step in education. 

Perhaps it might be better expressed rather as a 
broadening of the conception and expansion of the 
scope of the school than a degrading, or limiting of 
the role of the schoolroom. As Wesley's parish was 
the world, so in the new education the entire en- 
vironment of the child is his schoolroom, and should 
be utilized in his education. Half a century ago, 
the educational needs of a community were con- 
sidered amply met by a room with benches, desks, 
a blackboard and chalks, slates, pencils and paper, 
and a few books. What more apparatus could 
either child or teacher require for giving and getting 
"an eddication"? 

Even for the Higher Education, the required 
"plant" was almost equally simple. President 
Garfield's idea of a college — and an admirable 
one so far as it went — was "a log with President 
Hopkins on one end of it and a student on the 
other!" Of course, an educational genius like 
President Hopkins would have been the last one 
to make of those "log conferences" anything more 
than an hour's discussion of work already done, 
or plans for work to be done. But the idea of re- 
quired equipment for even a college in those days 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 163 

was extraordinarily bare and simple. A building 
with rooms enough to accommodate all the stu- 
dents who would be reciting at one time, a sufficient 
number of teachers to hear those recitations, and 
"set" the lessons for the next day or to deliver 
formal lectures filling so many hours per week, 
per term. For a library, the textbooks of the 
students, plus those personally accumulated by the 
professors, and a few encyclopaedias, concordances 
and other reference works. The campus, simply 
a stretch of ground large enough to contain the 
buildings, the whole establishment not costing 
more than a few tens of thousands of dollars. 

But to-day what a difference! The recitation 
rooms and the teachers' salaries are the smallest 
items; huge laboratories are demanded where 
students can do research work for themselves and 
demonstrate the soundness of laws and principles, 
instead of merely learning them by rote and accept- 
ing them on authority; machine shops and en- 
gineering establishments where hand and eye can 
be trained as well as brain; museums and collec- 
tions of natural history, of botany, of geology, of 
electrical and physical apparatus, of manufactures, 
and of art, where specimens of the most interesting 
facts and examples of the most important work of 
the world can be seen and handled; colleges of 
music, concert halls and pipe organs, where the 
musical side of our natures can be cultivated. 



i6 4 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

The library has become a great aggregation of a 
dozen special libraries and collections, together 
with large stores of original documents, of copies 
of important records where the students may 
quarry out information for themselves, and to 
assist them in utilizing this huge treasure-house, 
a librarian and staff of assistants almost as large 
as the entire faculty of the primitive college. 

Then come gymnasia, swimming pools, athletic 
fields, artificial lakes for rowing — everything, in 
fact, that will appeal to all the interests and pro- 
mote the whole development of every power of 
man. The college has become a miniature world 
and, in spite of the dreadful dominance of mediaeval 
and scholastic ideals which still persists, the college 
man is trained and fitted for life as never before! 

Something of the same subversive change, though 
upon simpler, broader and more natural lines, 
is due — indeed, already under way — in our 
common schools. The school existing in the midst 
of a community can utilize that community instead 
of having to create its own, as the college must. 
The walls of the schoolroom are already melting 
into thin air. Classes are becoming flying columns 
of explorers and investigators; the teachers, peri- 
patetic instead of sedentary philosophers. The 
whole educational army is being mobilized for ma- 
noeuvres in the open field, instead of staying in a 
barracks the year round doing yard drill, reciting 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 165 

tactics out of a book, and campaigning on the 
blackboard. 

Here is an outline of the tendencies and general 
drift of the new spirit in education. It is mani- 
festing itself in two ways: making instruction in 
the schoolroom less formal, and its condition more 
wholesome and natural; and doing more and more 
of the work of education outside of the schoolroom. 
In the first place that diabolical trinity of the old 
education, the Sacred Three R's, has been cast down 
from its shrine and reduced to its proper place, as 
servant and instrument in the mental development 
of the child, instead of an object of worship and end 
in itself. It is possible that we may in time get rid of 
that ancient abomination, the Spelling Class, and 
McGufTey's "Book of Prayer," as they have already 
done in Germany. But that will require rational- 
ized and civilized spelling first. The child's mind 
on entering school is no longer regarded as a blank 
page upon which anything desired by the teacher 
may be written, and upon which nothing of im- 
portance will be written except what she inscribes. 
The first business of the modern intelligent primary 
teacher is to investigate the contents of the child's 
mind; in other words, to find out exactly what it 
knows, the clearness of its ideas and its grasp upon 
their relations to one another. Then it is given 
some simple, natural object like an apple, or a flower, 
or the picture of a bird, asked to tell the teacher 



166 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and the other children what it knows about it; 
then the other children add their quota of infor- 
mation. If the items volunteered disagree, they 
will be encouraged to discuss the question to find 
out what are the actual facts in the case; then they 
model the object in clay, or wax, do their best to 
make a drawing of it upon the board and are given 
its name and told to write it underneath it, not 
by letters or words, but as a whole picture. 

Children, by the way, can write words just as 
easily as letters, and far more easily than pot-hooks 
and such inventions of inspired idiocy. How many 
of us to-day, who can write a respectable hand would 
undertake to fill a page with pot-hooks that would 
pass muster and win us a high mark? In like 
manner, the qualities or experiences and actions 
of the bird, flower, or pine cone are added to it, 
each as a new sacred sign, and in a short time the 
children are writing without having ever formally 
learned their letters. 

The next demon of the Trinity, Reading, is 
mastered in an equally simple and straightforward 
manner. A dozen excellent methods are in use, 
each one of them the best for the teacher who has 
devised it or is most skilled in its use. Any of 
them will reach the result, which is all that is 
needed! One, for instance, that is in use in the 
Watt School in Chicago is that of finding for each 
one of the children some verse or nursery rhyme, or 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 167 

little song with which he is familiar. Then these 
are printed from the school press by the pupils 
of the higher grades, and the child is helped to 
read his familiar favourite at sight, taking each word 
as a separate picture with a meaning of its own. 
Then another verse, which he can recite, is handed 
to him and he eye-reads this in the same manner. 
Words really have a great deal more individuality 
than letters, and it isn't long before he learns to 
recognize at sight all the commoner words in use 
in such verses and ballads, and any new words 
which resemble them he can, in the language of the 
street, "make a stab at." 

As a matter of fact, this is precisely the method 
which we fully educated and graduated grown-ups 
use in reading. Any new, or unfamiliar word is at 
first pronounced as the known word which it looks 
most like. Hence, the delicious blunders of Mrs. 
Malaprop and "English as She is Wrote." To 
stop and spell a new word out, letter by letter is a 
slow and painful process and one seldom resorted 
to by even well-educated individuals. We usually 
either skip it, or call it "that" until we can hear 
some more erudite person pronounce it properly. 

The last demon to be exorcised — 'Rithmetic 
— is cast out in even more bland and childlike 
fashion. Five woolly sheep are added to three 
painted, red cows and the result ascertained. 
One wee handful of marbles is taken out of a small 



168 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

bagful and the remainder counted. Three little 
tots each put two beans into a cup and ascertain 
the result; or twenty jack-straws are distributed 
equally among five players. And the children 
come to recognize these results, to realize that they 
will always occur and the simple principle on which 
they occur, without even knowing they are suf- 
fering the tortures of addition, subtraction and 
division, to say nothing of the "vexation" of mul- 
tiplication, and the insanity of fractions. 

The capacity of the human mind for self-hum- 
buggery is something enormous and incredible. 
Even in the zenith of our powers, we spell not by 
"Lindley Murray," or "Webster," but according 
to whether a word "looks right" after we have 
written it. We write not upon Spencerian prin- 
ciples, but upon the simplest and most rapid method 
of scratching down some sort of turkey-tracks 
which intelligent and inspired correspondents will 
recognize as meant for a word or a sentence. We 
read by recognizing words as we would the turns 
in a familiar road, and glimpsing whole sentences 
as we would go down stairs three steps at a time. 
Not one in fifty of us can pronounce, or even come 
within shouting distance of the correct pronuncia- 
tion of an utterly unfamiliar word. Our actual 
knowledge of arithmetic and the higher mathematics 
has shrunk to, and consists of, ability to add up 
in our heads figures under ten in columns not to 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 169 

exceed five places in length, to multiply numbers 
under ten by figures of less than seven, providing 
that we happen to remember correctly whether 
seven times nine is sixty-three, or fifty-six, and to 
divide any melon that comes our way, so that we 
will get the lion's share of it, and the other fellow 
the little end. 

He is a rata avis who can add up a column of 
figures, say a page of an average bank book, and 
get an accurate result in less than five trials. And 
yet we insist upon our luckless infants being grounded 
and drilled and instructed in all the superb prin- 
ciples and intricate applications of the Great 
Science of mathematics. All the mathematics that 
we actually retain, and practically use — unless 
we are engineers or bank clerks — could be taught 
to an intelligent boy of fourteen in one year. What 
is the use of binding upon each rising generation 
burdens which we no longer dream of bearing, and 
insisting upon their learning, with great labour 
and discomfort, a large amount of unnatural and 
unnecessary material which they will industriously 
proceed to forget as soon as they leave school? 
We read by eye, we cipher by rote, we write by 
"main force and awkwardness" and we spell by 
guess and God's mercy! 

It is high time that this solemn farce and hypo- 
critical humbuggery of holding up standards for 
the infant mind which we never dream of living 



170 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

up to ourselves should be abandoned. Of course, 
we will be told at once that there is altogether 
too much of this sort of thing going on already, 
that children are no longer "larned" to spell prop- 
erly and that the average common-school graduate 
can neither write a decent letter, add up a column 
of figures correctly, nor read aloud with intelligence 
and expression. But this complaint of the short- 
comings of the rising generation is one of the oldest 
stock-in-trade jeremiads of history. It was common 
talk in the days of the pyramids; it was a "gag" 
of the Indignant Parent in the Greek dramas, and 
I have little doubt that it was the shocking spelling, 
or abominable writing, or both combined, of Shem, 
Ham and Japheth that drove the venerable Noah 
to drink! As a matter of fact, most men and 
women, save those whose necessary occupations, 
such as business correspondence, or social notes, 
have driven them to much letter-writing, write 
poorly and spell worse! To make out that the 
poor youngster on leaving school is singular or 
peculiar in this respect, is a rank injustice. Even 
the "Father of his Country" would never have got 
more than two places from the bottom in a fifth 
grade spelling class! 

When the child is to be introduced to the Great 
Wide World about him, initiated into the high and 
solemn mysteries of "Jografry" and History, then 
the schoolroom is boldly departed from. Instead 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 171 

of beginning by introducing the blunt end of the 
wedge into the infant mind in the form of a mys- 
terious globe or a strangely-shaped picture puzzle 
with wriggley edges, like nothing else in the heavens 
above nor on the earth beneath, called the Con- 
tinent of North America — which is about as in- 
telligible to a child as a sheet of music would be to 
a puppy — he is set to studying and drawing maps, 
or plans of the street on which he lives, then the 
suburb, or ward in which the school is built, his 
home town and the country that surrounds it, 
the roads and railroads which run out of it and 
what they carry away for sale, or bring in for use. 
He draws plans of his schoolhouse, maps of its 
grounds and of the house in which he lives, and 
the farm, or suburb, in which it stands. He 
gets to understand the meaning of paths, and 
roads and the things and places which lie at the 
other end of them. This leads him at once, in- 
satiably curious, out into the valley, or great plain, 
or range of mountains which surrounds his home; 
to the wonders of the county seat and the Great 
City, and the Capital of the state and the broad 
Fatherland of which all these are a part. Instead 
of learning to define, with great labour, a penin- 
sula> or other "body of absurdity almost entirely 
surrounded by words," — a term, by the way, 
when completely mastered, he will probably have 
occasion to use about once in fourteen years, after 



172 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

he leaves the classroom — he is taken to the banks, 
or sand bars, of the nearest stream and shown 
those and other text-book phenomena such as Capes, 
Islands, Bays, Straits, Valleys, Plains and Hills 
"in the flesh," so that he will want to know what 
their names are himself and, what is even more 
important, see at the same glance how they are 
made and the forces that are at work shaping 
the face of the world. This leads at once into 
physical geography, geology, meteorology, to say 
nothing of nature study of all sorts, botany, zoology 
and agriculture. In fact the only limit to the things 
and subjects that can be studied from life and at 
white heat of curiosity in such excursions, is the range 
of the teacher's knowledge and the limitations of the 
children's time. 

History, instead of an appalling succession of 
dates and presidents, of kings and queens and 
famous battles and the "Rise and Fall Off" of 
empires, becomes a keen, gossipy, first-hand study 
of the history and experiences of our own town, 
the date of its founding, the site of its first building, 
its city hall, its jail, or court-house, details of its 
growth from the cluster of cabins at the crossroads, 
the coming of the first railway, the building of its 
first factory, the erection of its first brick or stone 
business block. Old buildings are explored, cellars 
and garrets scoured for relics and mementoes of 
earlier days; and if a public historical museum is 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 173 

not in existence, an amateur one is established in 
the schoolhouse. If the birthplace of some great 
man, or the place of some notable event of general 
interest is to be found in the town, a tablet is 
erected by the children to commemorate it. Long 
before this study is complete, of course, from half 
to two thirds of the history of the county has 
been uncovered; and a considerable share of that 
of the state, and of the nation as well. And the 
child is not only ready, but eager, to learn all about 
the history of these, or at least every part of it 
which can be brought into direct contact with, 
or has influence upon, himself and his town; and 
few other items are worth remembering in any 
place. If any events or names are so dead that 
they exist only upon monuments, or in written 
records, and awake no echo and leave no trace 
of influence upon the present, then they had better 
remain forgotten ! 

One of the obvious advantages of this natural 
method of education is its elasticity and perfect 
adaptability to all localities and conditions. The 
smaller the town, or more rural the school dis- 
trict then the more abundant and easily accessible 
are the broadest and most vitally important pages 
in the great book of Nature — the fields, the gardens, 
the farms, the brooks, and hills. Its only difficulty 
and expense will be in the matter of occasional 
trips to county seats, or state capitals for his- 



174 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

torical, and to adjacent cities, or neighbouring 
towns for commercial purposes. At the other 
end of the scale, the larger the community, the more 
strictly urban the school district, the more abun- 
dant will be its free, educational "plant" in the 
matter of factories, workshops, museums, botanical 
gardens, expositions and great public buildings, 
and the presence of large rivers, or bays, or of 
great transportation, or electric systems. Its 
heaviest expense and greatest difficulty lies in 
getting the free, open-air surroundings so vitally 
necessary for a schoolhouse, and the gardens, 
sheds and shops in which children can be given 
practical training of hand and eye together with 
brain, which they secure without expense in their 
own homes, the garden and barnyards in smaller 
towns and in country districts. 

Two well-marked tendencies are already at work 
to balance up, as it were, these inequalities, which 
give promise already of going far to solve the 
problem. One of these is already in existence — 
the large, well-organized, well-equipped, central, 
cooperative schools situated on the edge of a town 
or village, to which the children from six or eight 
surrounding country districts are brought in cov- 
ered wagons or 'busses every morning and taken 
back to their homes in the evening. These have 
been found to be exceedingly satisfactory in prac- 
tical operation, combining the freedom, fresh air, 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 175 

good food and direct contact with nature of the 
country, with that stimulus which comes from 
contact with a crowd and the longer terms, better 
methods and more skilful and helpful teaching 
of the city school with its well paid staff. 

At the other end of the scale, the reverse process 
has already been initiated, particularly in certain 
German and English municipalities, of carrying 
the school children of the central and crowded 
districts of great cities out to the suburbs, or even 
the open country, to school. By utilizing the 
suburban trolleys and trains of the morning rush- 
hour, which, after running into the city filled and 
crowded with clerks, operatives and business men, 
are running back almost empty, the expense of 
transportation can be made comparatively trifling 
and is more than balanced by the great saving in 
expense of land for school buildings, playgrounds 
and gardens. 

These schools were originally planned for chil- 
dren in poor health, particularly those who were 
believed to be likely to develop tuberculosis; 
and as their principal purpose was to build up 
the health of the children, their programme was 
constructed upon this basis and included some 
two hours' sleep in the open air, and a large share 
of the time for games, gardening and play. Only 
enough class work was given to keep the children 
from forgetting what they had already learned. 



176 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

But to the surprise of everybody connected with 
them, these little half-invalids not only held their 
own, but actually made up grades when they were 
behind; and on an average made faster progress 
than their healthy room-mates in the schools down- 
town. 

A similar delightful result has been obtained in 
the open air schools for the children of tubercular 
parents, and others predisposed to be tubercular, 
conducted by the departments of education in 
Boston and New York City. It is one of the 
ironies of our boasted system of education that a 
child must develop tuberculosis before it can obtain 
healthy and ideal school surroundings. The same 
method has been applied to healthy children in both 
private and public schools, with equally gratifying 
results. 

An amusing instance occurred in the town of 
Chelsea, Mass., after its destructive fire, which swept 
out of existence two thirds of its school buildings. 
As a temporary war measure, as fast as buildings 
could be constructed they were utilized for the in- 
struction of double the ordinary number of chil- 
dren, each squad being given half the usual hours 
in school, and the remainder of the time in super- 
vised play in public playgrounds and in parks. 
Before they had succeeded in supplying the number 
of buildings considered necessary for their school 
population, vague reports began to come in of the 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 177 

excellent progress that the children were making 
on this half-time principle. The wondering school 
board decided to look into the matter, and on 
making thorough investigation found that not only 
the health of the children but the progress in their 
studies was so much better under the two-hours- 
a-day-in-the-schoolhouse regime that they decided 
to continue the experiment further and postpone 
the building of the extra schools. 

One of the most significant and convincing tests 
of the superiority of the open-air school was that 
made in one of the public schools of Chicago under 
the auspices of its broad-minded and progressive 
school superintendent, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, on the 
initiative of its enthusiastic and original principal, 
Professor Watt. Its results are specially significant 
because the school is a typical downtown city school 
on the edge of the stockyards district, attended chiefly 
by the children of artisans and day labourers, and 
with a large sprinkling of foreign element, so that the 
material is neither selected, nor especially promising. 
As classes are so large that they have to be divided, 
the two rooms occupied by the first grade children 
were converted first by the throwing all the win- 
dows wide open and keeping them so, except upon 
the side from which storms come in winter. Then 
the benches and desks were taken out and the 
whole floor space of the room turned over to the 
children, who were supplied with toys, working 



178 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

material, games, books, and pictures, and en- 
couraged to form themselves, under the guidance 
of two young and sympathetic teachers in each 
room, into groups for purposes of play or work. They 
were allowed to wear their outdoor garments when- 
ever they wished and, as Professor Watt expressed 
it, "they could change their seats at any time 
without asking permission, for they didn't have 
any seats," except little, light, movable chairs and 
half of them sat on the floor. The instructions of 
the principal to the teachers, in his own words were : 
"Keep the youngsters busy, but don't let them learn 
anything if you can help it!" 

Each child was allowed to chose from the well- 
stored toy and book closets of the room what- 
ever toy, game, working material, book, or pictures 
he wished; and then shown how to make use of 
them. A busier pair than those two teachers 
during school hours could hardly be imagined! 
The first result was that the children promptly 
stopped having incessant colds in their heads 
and snuffles and sore throats, and grew rosy and 
active and happy. The second that about three 
months from the beginning of the term, one of 
the teachers came to the principal and reported 
that some fifteen children, whom she named, in 
her room were now ready to be promoted to the 
second grade. Quick as a flash snapped the reply, 
with a reassuring twinkle in the eye of the prin- 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 179 

cipal: "If you tell that to anybody else you'll 
lose your job. Go right on with the performance. " 

No child was obliged to enter these open-air 
rooms if his parents objected, as not a few of 
them did at first; but before the term was half 
over, they were coming to the school to beg that 
their little ones might be taken from the closed- 
up rooms and put into the windowless ones. Before 
the Easter vacation was reached, it was decided 
to apply the method to two other grades; and 
one of the higher grades having petitioned that 
their rooms should be turned into open-air ones, 
a pavilion was constructed upon the roof of the 
school for their use the sides of which were made up 
of curtains and movable sash. Now out of eighteen 
rooms in the building, sixteen are open-air. 

When asked how much farther the plan could 
be profitably carried, the pioneer principal exclaimed : 
"The next time I can find a school board that will 
build me a school just as I want it, I'll have them 
build me a barn, with sheds and a barnyard!" 

In fine, no school can be considered complete 
that does not include a large playground, school 
garden and group of sheds and shops. The most 
important and vital part of a school is not its school- 
house, but its grounds. At first sight the expense 
of such a plan would appear to be prohibitive, but 
in reality it is far from being so. It would cost 
money of course, like everything under the sun that 



180 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

is worth having, but in small towns and country 
districts this additional expense would be com- 
paratively slight; while in larger towns and cities 
quite an appreciable share of the additional money 
needed for the grounds could be saved on the build- 
ing. The ideal schoolroom is not a mere architec- 
tural triumph, nor an imposing monument to the 
memory of the schoolboard, solid and massive as an 
asylum or a prison, but an inexpensively con- 
structed, light, roomy, day-nursery, never exceeding 
two stories in height, or one room and a corridor in 
breadth, with broad staircases, wide hallways and 
at least one third to one half the wall space of each 
room in the shape of movable window sash, or shut- 
ters, so that it can be converted into a porch, or 
shed, in fine weather. Thoughtful students of the 
growth of the child are coming to much the same 
conclusion as experts have come to in regard to sana- 
toria for tuberculosis, that every dollar spent in 
constructing a building in excess of about one 
hundred and fifty dollars per patient is wasted, and 
worse! From a sanitary point of view, whatever is 
spent above a certain minimum sum upon a building 
is spent in overcoming the fact that it is a building, 
and keeping it light, airy and sunny enough for 
human use. 

The logical result of our ancient habit of making 
the schoolroom a place to keep children out of 
mischief, and teach them something to keep their 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD i8r 

minds employed, is now to be seen in our schools. 
It is not too much to say that our present system 
is literally on trial for its life. On every hand come 
complaints from merchants and business men that 
graduates of the schools are useless, unpractical, 
living in a world of theory; expecting to start with a 
salary of one hundred dollars a month and actually 
worth about three a week. 

The almost unanimous testimony of practical men 
is that the pupils have to be taken in hand and 
entirely reeducated from the bottom up; and the 
farther they have gone in the course the more 
radical must this recasting be. 

From the family physician comes the complaint 
that the school terms of the year are the times of 
headaches, of anemias, of epidemics of infectious 
diseases, of malnutrition, of nervous irritability, 
of capricious temper, and of general physical and 
mental depression. 

The hours of the school are so long, the air so 
bad, the discipline enforced as to prevention of 
movement and assumption of cramped and un- 
natural attitudes so absurd and irrational, that it 
would be hard to discover a child who is in any 
way improved, physically, by the schoolroom, and 
almost as difficult to find one who is not injured 
by it. 

From the parent, the public-spirited student of 
humanity, and the tax-payer combined, comes the 



i8 2 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

complaint that something like forty to sixty per cent, 
of all our children leave school between fourteen and 
sixteen years of age; and that many of them would 
do so earlier were they not restrained by the pres- 
sure of public opinion and the child-labour laws. 
This is not because they are compelled to earn a 
living, but chiefly because they have lost all in- 
terest and find no profit or nutrition in the highly 
clerical, anemic and lady-like instruction and mental 
pabulum which is placed before them after the 
fourteenth year. 

It is not that the child is passing through a period 
of special restlessness, but that this is the first time 
when he begins to assert his individuality and to 
realize how artificial, absurd, and unsatisfactory are 
the t^asks imposed upon him by the schoolroom. 
The community maintains, at an enormous expense, 
high schools for the use of all classes of its children. 
Two thirds of this expense is borne by the less fav- 
oured social classes, while nine tenths of the children 
of these classes and over half of the children of all 
classes are dropped and shaken and chilled out of 
the superb curriculum at, or before, the beginning 
of the high school. 

To put it roughly, all the community is taxed to 
support schools for the benefit of the children of 
| less than one third; which situation comes about 
almost solely on account of the uselessness, pedan- 
try, and unpracticalness of the subjects taught in 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 183 

these schools, or of the methods by which thejr are 
taught. 

Further, from expert students of the school 
situation has come of late the discovery that in the 
great cities of our country from fifteen to thirty-five 
per cent, of the children are retarded — that is to say,, 
from two to four years behind their grades. Which 
means that nearly one fifth of the total money ex- 
pended upon our schools is being wasted in teaching 
this proportion of the children the same thing two* 
or three times over in successive years. 

In some of the schools of New York City investi- 
gated, so ill-suited, unfitted to the capacity of the 
children was the instruction that in some of the 
rooms and grades there were actually children who 
had been going to school since before other children 
in that room were born! A more eloquent comment 
upon the utter lack of fitness, of interest, and of 
growth value of our curriculum for the average 
child could hardly be imagined. 

What is to be done? In the opinion of the most 
careful and loving students of the child and of 
his needs, nothing less is demanded than an abso- 
lute recasting of our entire educational system, 
moulding it to fit the needs of the child, to pro- 
mote at every point his interests, his growth and 
his health, instead of antagonizing them two thirds 
of the time, as it does now; to make his education 
fit in both with his previous life and development 



184 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

before he enters school and with the world and life 
in which he is to live, after he leaves school. We 
take a young child now, and break him in to the 
schoolroom, training him to breathe an entirely new 
and artificial atmosphere, as if we were to turn a frog 
into a fish. Then, after preserving him with great 
care and pains in this gold-fish bowl for ten years, 
we throw him gasping out on to the bank to learn 
to breathe air again and completely recast his scheme 
and ideas of life, in order to fit himself for the world 
in which he finds himself. 

If we deliberately took pains to unfit a child for 
real life, we could hardly improve upon our pres- 
ent school system. For investigation we substitute 
memory; for initiative, tame obedience to authority; 
for self-activity, parrot-like imitation; for doing, 
talking; and for things, words. Then we wonder 
why he is not practical and properly fitted for the 
battle of life! 

The main aim of our system of education is 
superiority instead of service. It tends to make a 
select, superior, cultured class, who shall be more 
or less borne upon the backs and shoulders of 
the uncultured mass of the people; to breed prigs 
and parasites instead of men and women. 

The training appropriate for those two purely orna- 
mental and, on the whole expensive and undesirable 
parasites, the Gentleman and the Scholar, still domi- 
nates too much of our school curriculum. The ideally 



BRICK WALLS AND GROWING CHILD 185 

educated man still is to be in the world, but not of 
it — a chosen stratum, a special priesthood of cul- 
ture and superiority. 

How are we going to square our education with 
the facts of life, and prepare the child for this 
world instead of the next?' 



CHAPTER X 



EYES AND EARS 



ONE of the most singular characteristics of 
humanity is its dread of the new and the 
untried. We boast ourselves a progressive 
race, and yet we are always looking backward, with 
longing, and even regret. We have survived and 
triumphed gloriously in the past, but — heaven 
only knows what we are coming to in the future! 
The old days were the good days, and the long days. 
The present are the short, and the evil. Especially 
are we afraid of the conditions which we have 
created ourselves, and which we call civilization. 
Savagery was full of primitive vigour and of 
childhood's joy in existence for its own sake. 
Barbarism throbbed with the hot pulses of love 
and the lust of battle, while civilization is the 
"lean and slippered pantaloon" of later middle 
life, sure to blunt the senses and to chill the 
pulses. Forgetting among a thousand other facts, 
that the favourite occupation of civilization which 
we call colonization has been the sending forth of 
our least successful, headed by our most restless 
and ill-balanced, to beat the Savage and the Bar- 

186 



EYES AND EARS 187 

barian at his own game, and wipe him off the face 
of the earth. 

Nowhere is our dread of civilized conditions more 
vividly exemplified than in our apprehension as to 
their effects upon those wonderfully delicate and 
exquisite mechanisms, our special senses, and 
particularly those of sight and hearing. No com- 
moner plaint is heard upon every hand than that 
we are becoming a race of spectacle wearers, that 
our children are born short-sighted, and that our 
sight and hearing are breaking down under the 
terrific strains of civilized life. 

We seem to have good reason and evidence 
for this pessimistic belief. On every hand, grave 
and reverend seniors assure us that nobody ever 
dreamed of wearing "specs" before they were gray- 
headed in their time, and now we put them upon 
babies as soon as they can toddle. Fifty years ago, 
such a thing as "eye-strain" was never heard oL 
Now it is one of the most fashionable complaints, 
a mark of intellectuality and culture. Examination 
of the eyes of our school-children reveals the horri- 
fying fact that from fifteen per cent, to twenty-five 
per cent, of them present defects which need glasses 
for their correction. And in Germany, at least, this 
percentage increases from the lower through the 
higher grades. Even those who escape the grosser 
defects can nearly always discover, if they examine 
closely enough, that they have some trace of astig- 



188 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

matism and are thus qualified for brevet-rank in 
our modern aristocracy of defectives. 

Moreover, from every printing office and pressroom 
are pouring forth floods of newspapers, illustrated 
magazines, books and pamphlets which we must 
master, or at least glance over, or fall behind the 
procession, and thus complete the ruin of our 
already weakened and overstrained optics. In ad- 
dition, we have floods of corroborative evidence as to 
the decadence of all our other senses and powers. 
We have practically lost our sense of smell as com- 
pared with the savage who can track the fox un- 
aided in the dewy morning. Our teeth are decaying 
before they have got fairly set in our heads. Our 
ears have become dulled and stunned by the roar 
and the clamour of our workshops and our city 
streets. Our heads are coming through our hair 
before we have got fairly settled in life, and alto- 
gether, our boasted cephalic extremity is a deplor- 
able spectacle of decay. 

All of which literally baffling presentment, how- 
ever, is based upon one common foundation, and 
that is the one so frankly given by the great 
Doctor Johnson for one of his few mistakes in 
definition in his famous dictionary. When asked, 
with a polite simper, by a lady of literary preten- 
sions : 

"What, Doctor, led you to define versatility in 
such a way?" 



EYES AND EARS 189 

" Ignorance, ma'am, pure gnorance!" thundered 
the doctor. 

Our certainty that modern eyes, ears, teeth, etc., 
are decadent, is in direct ratio to our picturesque 
and profound ignorance of their exact condition in 
the savage. The noble savage is a myth. Instead 
of being a model of physical perfection, he was 
undersized, narrow-chested, short-lived, and with a 
perfectly enormous mortality. The average savage 
tribe in the open has a death rate of from one and a 
half times to double that of our slum populations. 
There is no disease or defect known to civilization 
to which he is not subject, except certain of the 
infectious diseases. And when these latter reach 
him, they mow him down like grass before the scythe. 
Competent dentists who have examined collections 
of savage crania, discover every form of decay of 
the teeth and of disease of the gums which are 
known under civilization, and in almost the same 
proportion. The keenness of his sight, his smell 
and his hearing are simply the result of incessant 
and inescapable training, living in the constant 
atmosphere of danger and of suspicion. If he did 
not keep his senses strained to the utmost and 
stretched for the faintest intimation of danger, he 
could never have survived. We have let some of 
our senses lapse somewhat under the slothful se- 
curity of civilization, particularly that of smell, 
which might properly be described as one of the lost 



190 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

arts. But we can reacquire them, not merely in a 
generation, but in half of a single lifetime, as hun- 
dreds of white trappers, drovers and hunters have 
abundantly proved. 

Now as to his eyesight and hearing. Here the 
proposition is somewhat less definite, for the vivid 
and striking reason that the savage boy or girl never 
had to learn to read, since they had no books. If 
our modern boys and girls were allowed to grow up 
as did the savages, reading only the book of nature, 
we should hear very little of eyestrain. Even 
if defects were present, they would never be dis- 
covered. The savage uses his eyes at least three 
fourths of the time at long range, and for large or 
moving objects — the flight of birds through the 
tree-tops, the trout at the bottom of the pool, the 
deer in the brush, the band of horsemen sweeping 
across the prairie. Even when he becomes a student 
of art, his pictures are drawn with a charred stick 
or a chunk of yellow ochre; and such writings as he 
possessed are pictographs which can be read at 
fifty feet from horseback. The only close work 
to be done is in such odds and ends of time as 
he spends in shaping and polishing his weapons, 
or in tattooing himself or his comrades. Of 
course the savage woman has her fancy work. 
She wouldn't be feminine if she didn't. But her 
needles are the size of a brad-awl, and her 
threads like whipcord, so that the resulting pat- 



EYES AND EARS 191 

terns can be readily worked on at the full length 
of the arm. 

Civilized man, on the other hand, uses his eyes 
for the deciphering of tiny little letters, strung in 
straight lines like buds on a stalk — for a total of 
hours every day of his life, and often eight hours at 
a stretch. No wonder that the eye which the savage 
found perfect for his purposes is discovered to be 
inadequate for modern use. 

In short, practically the only basis that we have 
for our oft repeated and firm conviction that the 
civilized eye is inferior to the savage is the fact that 
the savage, or inherited, eye will not do civilized 
work without assistance. When that assistance is 
given the eye becomes, with intelligent use, ade- 
quate to its new task. And we have no valid 
proof that the civilized eye has become any weaker 
or less adequate during the past hundred years. 
Moreover, we now have a number of indications 
tending to show that the savage eye is defective in 
the same way t if not to the same degree, that the 
civilized one is. First of all, that from fifty to 
seventy per cent, of all children of whatever grade 
in society or nationality examined, shortly after 
birth, are found to be born slightly long-sighted, 
which is far the commonest defect for which glasses 
are worn. So that all that the strains of later life 
do is to reveal this already congenital defect. 
Second, that such examinations as have been made 



i 9 2 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

of Indian and Negro children show about the same 
percentage of long-sightedness, though less, of the 
opposite defect, short sight. Third that examina- 
tions of the eyes of thousands of school children in 
all countries show as high a grade of long sight among 
the children of ignorant and illiterate peasants and 
artisans as among those of the most intelligent and 
cultured classes who have been readers for five or 
six generations, and a much higher degree of defects 
due to diseases of the eye. Fourth, that all races of 
whom we have any knowledge see the stars as 
star-shaped, cross-like, or radiating bodies. This 
star, or rayed shape, is due to astigmatism. If our 
eyes were perfectly free from this defect, the stars 
would appear to us as tiny, perfectly round points 
of light, like miniature suns or moons. No race, 
however nobly savage, has ever considered "star- 
shaped" the equivalent of round. 

Still every reader of his Cooper knows that a 
savage has "eyes like a hawk"; while every town 
dweller is by comparison "blind as a bat." But 
careful experiments and repeated practical tests 
have shown that this difference is not in keenness 
of vision, but in skill in interpreting what is seen. 
The city man sees, for instance, precisely the same 
brown and yellow blurs upon a brown, yellow and 
purple background that the savage does, and just 
as vividly. Only he doesn't know that which 
means deer, which the savage, by daily and hourly 



EYES AND EARS 193 

incessant training from childhood, has learned to 
recognize. 

The hawk, it may be remarked in passing, is a 
much overrated bird in this, as in several other 
respects. And his most affectionate students are 
now of the opinion that he doesn't see any farther, 
sharper, or better than we do, but owes his undoubted 
quickness in detecting game or an enemy to the alti- 
tude of his position, his unobstructed view, and to 
the fact that his two eyes work separately, and don't 
bother to try to get together in binocular vision. 
So that he covers the whole face of the horizon 
except a small arc directly behind the back of his 
head. Only keep perfectly still, and match your 
surroundings sufficiently closely not actually to 
swear at them, and the hawk will sweep and flutter 
over you less than thirty yards in the air, without 
ever detecting your presence. 

The human eye is as good a piece of optical 
apparatus as anything that walks or swims or flies, 
and infinitely more dependable than most. The 
average farm-bred white man can in a few years' 
practice in the open learn to see the partridge 
among the dead leaves, the quail in the ,stubble 
and the deer on the hillside, just as quickly and 
as instinctively as the Indian, though every sound, 
every rustle, every shift of the light, change of 
colour, or puff of air speaks directly to the Indian, 
without his having to stop and reason about it in 



194 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

a way that it takes decades for a white man to 
grow into. 

We may therefore, face the problem calmly, 
secure in the thought that we have no adequate 
evidence that any process of decadence has as yet 
set in, or that the human eye has as yet been seriously 
harmed or shown any sign of giving way under the 
strain of civilization. 

The dangers to which the modern eye is exposed, 
fall into two great classes; disease and overuse from 
near work. Here another great consoling fact 
faces us, and that is that, while overwork and con- 
sequent eyestrain are far the commonest troubles 
that befall the modern eye, discomfort and ineffi- 
ciency are as far as they are able to go in ninety-nine 
cases out of one hundred. Never yet was an eye lost 
solely from eyestrain. Practically all blindness is due 
to disease, and not to overwork. More significant 
yet, seven tenths of the diseases which produce blind- 
ness are the acute infections, small-pox, granular 
ophthalmia, or trachoma, gonorrhoea and syphilis. 
Against these civilization wages an unceasing and 
victorious conflict. Small-pox it has practically 
overcome, thanks to vaccination. Trachoma is 
rapidly disappearing, except from our slums, and 
our most ignorant and degraded peasant popula- 
tions. Gonorrhoea and syphillis alone hold their 
own as "blinders," on account of our highly intel- 
ligent amblyopia in declining to recognize them 



EYES AND EARS 195 

officially or mention them in public. Just so long as 
we continue to consider it immodest and improper 
to discuss these last two blights, so long they will 
continue to put out the eyes of little children by the 
thousand. The danger, then, of total blindness, is 
less under civilization than ever before. One hun- 
dred years ago, from forty to sixty per cent, of 
those who were in the blind asylums were there on 
account of small-pox. Now vaccination has reduced 
their percentage to less than two per cent. 

The percentage of blindness from trachoma has 
enormously diminished, while to-day, the lion's 
share of the population of our blind asylums belongs 
to gonorrhoea, with syphilis a fair second. In 
the different asylums in this country and in Europe, 
from fifteen to forty per cent, of the inmates are 
put there by gonorrhoea ; yet we do nothing publicly 
to stop it, because it isn't "modest!" No known 
disease which causes blindness is increasing under 
civilization. So that when we do finally come to our 
senses and fight all diseases alike, as we surely will, 
we have good right confidently to expect that 
blindness will be practically abolished, or reduced 
to less than five per cent, of its present frequency. 

Even the risk of blindness from accidental causes, 
such as wounds, blows, scaldings, and burnings 
is very much less than it was before, and still dimin- 
ishing, on account of the enormously increased power 
of curing wounds of the eye placed in our hands by 



196 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

antisepsis and asepsis. Where ten eyes were lost 
by wounds becoming infected, less than one eye is 
now lost. 

Only one form of blindness can be fairly said to 
be becoming more common, and that is cataract. 
While this is becoming more common, because a 
larger percentage of people are living to the age 
when it naturally occurs, yet the actual blindness 
caused by it has been almost wiped out by the 
delicacy and perfection of the operation which has 
been devised for its cure. Nine tenths of all cases 
of cataract can be given good working vision for 
both reading and distance, by removing the opaque 
lens and replacing it by lenses of glass, properly 
adjusted and worn as spectacles, in front of the eye, 
instead of inside it. 

I almost hesitate to apply the term "disease" to 
this curious process, which is really a form of matur- 
ation or ripening, and has, in its ordinary form, noth- 
ing to do with disease, or conditions of the health. 
It is a singular and most interesting process. To 
put it very crudely, a little ball of cells has formed 
itself in the centre of eye, for the purpose of acting 
as a lens or focuser of the light rays. In order to 
do this perfectly, it had to become absolutely trans- 
parent. And as blood vessels, of even the most hair- 
like delicacy are opaque, it, so to speak, surrendered 
its birthright in this regard and became entirely 
dependent upon the absorption of fluids from the 



EYES AND EARS 197 

surrounding tissues of the eye — the iris, choroid 
and vitreous body. Unfortunately, however, under 
these conditions its only method of growth possible 
is from without, by additions to its surface, just like 
a tree trunk, or a plant stem. And after a time this 
process of steady deposit of new material upon the 
outer surface reaches a point where it completely 
cuts off from an adequate supply of nutriment the 
cells in the centre of the mass. These slowly die at 
a period anywhere from the fifty-fifth to the seven- 
tieth year, undergo fatty degeneration, and become 
opaque, and behold cataract is formed. 

This little body that we have been describing, 
the crystalline lens of the eye, is in fact a plant-like 
organism in an animal body, and like the plant it 
ultimately reaches a point at which it begins to 
decay at the heart. 

The operation for cataract is simplicity itself, 
merely an incision with a very delicate knife, un- 
der strictest aseptic precautions, through the coats 
of the eyeball. A little cutting with a sharp hook 
or delicate pair of scissors, to liberate the lens from 
the iris and its capsule, gentle pressure upon the 
ball of the eye, and, pop! up comes the opaque 
and useless lens, leaving the eyeball perfectly trans- 
parent once more. All that remains to be done is 
to put a lens of similar strength in the frame of a pair 
of spectacles, and hang it before the eye, to take the 
place of the lens removed. 



i 9 8 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

With all our ingenuity however, we can only 
imitate Nature at a distance, as it were. And as 
this hew lens is glass, and cannot adjust itself, or, 
as the term is, accommodate "for near vision," we 
have to have a second stronger glass to read with, 
and sometimes a third for very close work. With 
these lenses however, the man who has had his 
cataract successfully removed, can count upon 
anywhere from half to three quarters of full vision, 
which is abundant for all practical purposes. 

This brings us to the fact that a large share of our 
troubles with our eyes in modern times is due, like 
cataract, to the fact that we have got into the in- 
veterate habit of outliving them, as well as our 
teeth, our hair and our hearing, and of this we ob- 
stinately refuse to break ourselves. Nature doesn't 
borrow any trouble before she comes to it. And as 
the average savage lived only about thirty years, 
Nature built his eye to last forty to forty-five, 
giving him a liberal margin of fifty per cent. Then 
we blame her, because this eye that was loaded to 
carry for forty-five years, will not go passively on 
and do all that is required of it till sixty, seventy or 
even seventy-five years of age. 

When we are willing to reform our bad habit of 
living too long, to abandon our "bloodthirsty clinging 
to life," as Matthew Arnold called it, we shall find 
less reason to complain of our eyes and ears. 

Now, as to that hydra-headed monster, eyestrain, 



EYES AND EARS 199 

the dragon which is apt to devour the eyesight of the 
civilized races. This is almost entirely dependent 
upon a series of oversights on the part of Mother 
Nature in not making all our eyes just the proper 
shape. She is still unfortunately "trying her 
'prentice hand on man," and the lassies as well. The 
sole purpose of the shape and clear parts of the 
human eye cornea, lens and vitreous body — is to act 
as a lens which will bring rays to a focus on the 
retina at the back of the eye. As all light-rays com- 
ing from objects more than twenty feet away are 
practically parallel, and these constitute nine tenths 
of a savage's range of vision, the eye is made with a 
lens of such shape and thickness that it will, when 
at rest, bring parallel rays to a focus upon the 
retina, without effort. This is what has been termed 
the emmetropic, or normal eye. But unfortunately, 
this normal eye, like a good many other normal 
things, is only a figure .of speech. And from fifty 
to sixty per cent of us are born with eyes which will 
not bring parallel rays to a focus without the as- 
sistance of a little muscular effort. In other words, 
the average eye is what we term hypermetropic, or 
long-sighted. 

Here comes in however, the really masterly piece 
of mechanism in the human eye, which atones for all 
the purely optical defects of that organ, and makes it 
one of the most wonderful " scopes" in the world, 
ranging all the way from the distant range of the 



200 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

telescope to the minute accuracy of a weak micro- 
scope, and that is the so called "power of accomo- 
dation." The precise mechanism is too elaborate 
for description without a detailed knowledge of the 
anatomy of the eye. But the principle is simplicity 
itself, viz., that by the contraction of a small cir- 
cular muscle, the so-called ciliary muscle — the 
crystalline lens, the body involved in cataract, is 
made to become more bulging from before backward, 
and hence increases the converging power of the 
eye, so that even rays which are not parallel, but 
divergent, can be brought to a focus upon the retina. 

Even this power of course has its limits, as you 
can readily test for yourself, by focusing upon the 
tip of your finger at full arm's length for instance, 
and rapidly approaching it toward the face, when 
it will be found to become blurred at a certain point 
whose -distance from the eye will vary according to 
your age and the power of your ciliary muscle. In 
childhood this "near point," may be as close as four 
or five inches; but by middle life, it will usually have 
reced-ed to about twelve or fourteen. 

Now, supposing that you are born, as most of 
us ape, with an eye that requires a slight muscular 
effort in order to focus parallel or distant rays upon 
the retina. It is of course, obvious that when we 
have habitually used that eye for hours at a stretch 
and seven days in the week upon objects from one to 
three feet distant, the rays from which are markedly 



EYES AND EARS 201 

divergent, that this muscle is going to become 
overtired. When this is the case, what is to be done? 
If the defect of the eye be only slight in degree, as 
fortunately it is in the majority of cases, it will be 
sufficient to moderate the amount of near work to 
within reasonable limits, to take the best and most 
intelligent precautions as to the amount and the 
direction of the light by which the work is done, to 
give the eye plenty of work for distant purposes, 
in order to arouse it and restore its tone, and to keep 
both eye and system in good physical condition. 
When, however, this defect of the eye goes beyond a 
certain degree, these measures are inefficient; and 
as it consists solely in a slight flattening of the eye, 
we have at our disposal a mechanical remedy, in 
the shape of a lens or glass, whose bulge, or thick- 
ness in the centre, is equivalent to the degree of 
flattening of the eye. When we put a lens in front 
of the eye for the correction of long sight, the defect 
that calls for certainly half to two thirds of all the 
spectacles that are worn, we are simply correcting 
an oversight on nature's part, and giving the eye 
a new power. We are not doing the eye the slightest 
damage. On the contrary, we are saving it from a 
painful and crippling strain, which will last the whole 
lifetime of the individual. Instead of the eye be- 
coming old sooner from wearing glasses, it will 
retain its youth for a much longer period than it 
would without them. 



202 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

This is the gist of the wearing of glasses for long 
sight, as it applies to the child or the youth. Later 
in life, another form of it develops, which requires 
appropriate correction. That is the well-known 
"failing sight" for reading or writing purposes, of 
middle and elderly life, technically known as pres- 
byopia, "elderly sight." This painfully familiar 
phenomenon is due to the fact that while the crys- 
talline lens is growing all through life, after the man- 
ner described in discussing cataract, it is growing in 
thickness more rapidly at the circumference than at 
the centre, and hence is becoming flatter and of 
lower refractive power. So that after a time the 
eye will no longer bring parallel rays to a focus on 
the retina. What is, however, more effective in 
producing this "old sight" is that as it grows both 
larger and older, it loses elasticity, and is no longer 
able to change its shape so as to "accommodate" 
the eye for near vision. Here again, the same con- 
dition confronts us as in congenital hypermetropic 
and we simply place a lens in front of the eye, whose 
bulge corresponds to the degree of flattening of the 
lens. This flattening and loss of elasticity has 
usually progressed in most eyes at such a rate that 
by somewhere about the fortieth year, or shortly 
after, it becomes necessary to correct it by means of 
a lens. As it is however progressing, it will be 
necessary to supply a somewhat stronger lens on an 
average of about every five years until after the 



EYES AND EARS 203 

sixty-fifth year, after which the change either 
ceases, or is much slower. 

Instead of the eye — either in youth or in old 
age — being made any weaker by these glasses, it is 
made stronger and more efficient, and younger in 
every way. The failing sight of old age has been 
almost abolished by the combined aid of glasses and 
the operation for cataract, and there is no necessity 
whatever that those who look out of the window 
should be darkened as long as life lasts. Glasses 
in fact have done more to reduce the pains and 
penalties of old age and to prolong the comfort and 
efficiency of life than any other single mechanical 
factor invented. So long as a man can see well, 
and read his newspapers and his favourite books, 
there is no reason for his losing interest and enjoy- 
ment in life. 

When we add the good digestion that comes 
from properly made artificial teeth, and the abo- 
lition of deafness by intelligent care of the nose and 
throat, it is not too much to say that civilization 
has almost abolished the more serious penalties of 
old age. 

Now, as to the opposite defect of the eye, known as 
short sight, or myopia, due again to nature's over- 
sight. This is due to the eye having overgrown, 
so to speak, so that it is too large and bulges too 
much, just as the long-sighted or hypermetropic eye 
is flattened too much. It has been proposed, simply 



2o 4 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

as a convenient figure of speech, to call one of these 
the "onion-shaped " or flat eye, and the other the 
"orange-shaped" or bulging eye. 

Naturally, this produces just the opposite effect 
upon the light rays, viz., that parallel rays of light 
entering the eye are brought to a focus in front of 
the retina instead of behind it, as in long sight. 
Equally obviously, as every effort of the ciliary 
muscle increases the bulge of the eye, muscular 
activity can do nothing to cure this defect. In 
fact, it simply aggravates it. However, just as soon 
as objects are brought within five of six feet or nearer 
so that the rays from them become divergent, then 
these rays are brought to a focus upon the retina 
without effort. So that the possessor of the myopic 
eye can read and write almost perfectly, and with 
very little effort. Objects can be approached to the 
eye until they even touch the tip of the nose without 
becoming blurred in their outlines, so that is often 
the impression of the myope that he has an un- 
usually strong eye, though for distant vision, he is 
of course, as his name implies, short-sighted. The 
cure of this defect is as simple as that of hyperopia, 
viz., to put a concave, or — , lens in front of the eye, 
which will neutralize its bulge, and will cause parallel 
rays to be brought to a focus upon the retina. 
Obviously these glasses must be worn constantly, 
except that occasionally they may be removed for 
near work. This form of defect of the eve can be 



EYES AND EARS 205 

made worse by excessive use of the eyes for near 
work, and especially in bad light, or under un- 
favourable hygienic surroundings. While fortu- 
nately less than a third as common as long sight, it is 
far more dangerous. Both because it increases the 
risks of accident and because when eyes are over- 
strained in poorly lighted rooms, and especially in 
underfed children who live in unsanitary surround- 
ings, this defect increases with the use of the eye, 
and with the growth of the child. In the higher 
grades of certain German schools, for instance, it 
reaches the appalling prevalence of thirty-five per 
cent, to forty-five per cent, of the class, though in the 
lower grades it is not more than fifteen per cent. 

There is still another type of defective shape of 
the eye, which is quite common, though less so than 
either long sight or short sight, and that is 
astigmatism. This consists in a complicated con- 
dition or shape of the eye, caused by its bulging, or 
being flattened — as the case may be — more in the 
vertical plane than in the horizontal, thus giving 
a skew shape to the eye. This, though less blinding, 
is an exceedingly annoying and irritating defect, 
and gives rise not only to difficulty and trouble in 
using the eyes, but also to many disturbances of the 
nervous system, which are not at first recognized 
as due to eyestrain, such as headache, nervous 
dyspepsia and neuralgic attacks. It can also be 
corrected by placing glasses of a peculiar shape, 



206 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

known as "cylinders," before the eye. Whatever 
the form of the defect, it is of the utmost importance 
that this should be recognized and properly fitting 
glasses adjusted by a competent oculist, and worn. 

All progressive departments of education are 
now insisting upon a periodic examination of the 
eyes of all school children, and the correcting of 
such defects as may be found. It is little better 
than a waste of time and money to endeavour to 
teach children who are suffering from uncorrected 
long sight, short sight, or astigmatism, for not only 
are they unable to see properly, and their poor 
little eyes become easily fatigued and confused, 
but they are liable to headache, loss of appetite, 
restless sleep, and a whole group of nervous symp- 
toms which will persist in spite of all sorts of treat- 
ment until their cause is discovered. The popular 
impression that glasses in some way weaken the 
eye, or aggravate the defects which they are in- 
tended to cure, is entirely baseless, unless they have 
been fittedby incompetent persons. And the terri- 
ble penalty that you "become dependent upon them," 
is merely an expression of the good judgment of your 
eye, when once it has been given full and perfect 
vision, in declining to be satisfied with anything else. 

One touch of silver lining in the cloud of the 
myope should be mentioned and that is that this 
flattening and hardening process which comes on 
with age and makes the long-sighted individual 



EYES AND EARS 207 

more long-sighted has the fortunate effect of 
steadily lessening his defect. So that about the 
time that his long-sighted comrades begin to put 
their glasses on for age, he can begin to weaken his, 
and ultimately may be able to dispense with them 
altogether. This is the explanation of those in- 
stances of how much stronger and healthier the 
eyes were a generation or two ago, based on the 
statement that Grandfather So-and-So was able to 
read his Bible without specs at the age of seventy- 
five. The good man had probably been a myope 
of moderate degree all his life without discover- 
ing it, and owed his ability to do without spectacles 
in old age merely to the abnormal shape of his eye, 
and not to the preservation of his youthful vigour. 

Like eyesight, the only difference between the 
hearing of the savage and of the civilized man lies 
in the extent and direction in which they have been 
trained. Deafness is quite common among savages, 
though less so than in civilized races for the grim 
reason that the savage who cannot hear the approach 
of the panther or the tiger, or the stealthy footfall 
of the scalp-hunter from a hostile tribe, is not 
likely to attain a ripe old age. There is nothing in 
the conditions of civilization which tends to throw 
any more severe strain upon the ear or hearing. The 
popular impression that the din and clatter and jan- 
gle of modern city life, of machinery, of locomotives, 
of boiler factories, of steam whistles, has an injurious 



2o8 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

effect upon the nerves of hearing, is without iounda- 
tion. Such effects as may be produced by these 
abominable and cacophonous noises, is due entirely 
to their secondary effect upon the nervous system, 
particularly through causing loss of sleep, or rest. 

As in the case of vision, the real enemy of hearing, 
the principal cause of acquired deafness, is disease, 
and particularly the infectious diseases. Complete or 
absolute deafness is usually due to disease or defect 
of the auditory nerve, or nerve of hearing. The 
defect is usually congenital and about one third of 
deaf mutes are born deaf. The majority of them 
however are made deaf by the attack on the audi- 
tory nerve of some disease in infancy or early child- 
hood, most commonly meningitis, particularly the 
cerebro-spinal, or epidemic variety. 

Neither of these distressing conditions is fort- 
unately very common, not more than one or two 
children in a thousand being affected. It is perhaps 
hardly necessary to say in passing that children who 
are born deaf, or become so within the first four or 
five years of life, are usually dumb. Their loss of 
speech has usually nothing whatever to do with the 
vocal organs, which are usually in perfect condition; 
but, being entirely unable to hear the sounds which 
they themselves make, they cannot control them so 
as to form articulate speech, nor can they hear and 
imitate the sounds made by others. They can, 
however, scream or cry out, groan, etc., often very 



EYES AND EARS 209 

loudly, but with absolutely no meaning or inflection 
in the sounds. By an ingenious system of instruc- 
tion, substituting the position of the lips and the 
sensation of the muscles of the throat for the sense of 
hearing, they can be taught to speak quite clearly 
and fairly, though in a mechanical, colourless, pho- 
nographic voice. 

Nine tenths, however, of the defects of hearing, 
are partial, and these are almost invariably due to 
inflammations beginning in and extending from the 
throat up through the eustachian tubes to the drum- 
cavity and do not originate in the ears at all. Scarlet 
fever is the most frequent factor, and will some- 
times almost completely destroy the hearing. Diph- 
theria also may produce deafness in this way, as 
also may tuberculosis. But the commonest cause 
of deafness is ordinary catarrhal inflammation of 
the nose and throat, neglected until it extends to 
or blocks up the eustachian tubes. In the earlier 
years of life, this inflammation is set up most fre- 
quently by adenoids, in later life, by a variety of 
chronic catarrhal processes. Take care of the throat, 
and the ears will take care of themselves in ninety- 
five cases out of a hundred. The only way to cure 
disease of the ear is to treat it while it is still in the 
throat. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 

MAN has tried his hand at worshipping 
almost everything in the universe that 
he can think of — including himself. His 
worship was a desperate attempt to anchor himself 
to something that would endure, to range himself 
in the scheme of things. He has worshipped 
the wind and the lightning, the sun, moon, and 
stars, the earth and the sea, his ancestors and 
the phantoms of his dreams: always something 
behind him, ever something in the past. 

The time has come for a worship of the future. 
Why not worship our posterity instead of our 
ancestry, our children instead of our grandparents. 
Such a religion would have the marked practical 
advantage of doing good to the object worshipped, 
as well as to ourselves. As the main object of 
religion has ever been to ingratiate ourselves with 
the Powers That Be, here is a chance to consolidate 
ourselves with the powers that are to come, in- 
stead of with the "Have Beens." 

To worship our children would give the best pos- 
sible guarantee that they will worship our memory, 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 211 

which is what we desire above all things. Our 
deepest dread is of being forgotten; that is the only 
perdition which we fear. In the race we have 
been alive since the beginning of time, and in the 
race and its memories of us, we shall endure until 
all eternity. If we long for immortality, here 
it is. If we yearn for something enduring, ever 
conquering, something by the side of whose an- 
tiquity the pyramids and the Sphinx are but as 
mushrooms, behold it! 

We used to regard life as something fleeting, 
perishable, to be destroyed by a breath, evanescent 
as a melting snowflake. Now we know it to be 
a thing almost infinitely hard, enduring, resistant 
to every change, and to every onslaught, forcing 
its way over every sort of opposition, adapting 
itself to every shift of circumstance and change 
of scenes, but remaining itself unchanged. 

No snow-capped mountain chain, no sculptured 
obelisk, no shape of a continent has changed as 
little as man has in the last fifty thousand years. 
The individual dies, but the race remains, un- 
changed, save by improvement and, barring some 
cosmic catastrophe will continue so to survive 
indefinitely. 

And fear not lest Existence closing your 
Account and Mine shall know the like no more 
The Eternal Saki from that bowl has poured 
Millions of bubbles like us, and shall pour. 



212 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

The race has made us what we are. In the race 
is all our hope of the future. What can be a higher 
and more sacred duty than to preserve the purity 
of its stream, and hand on its inheritance un- 
diminished, its torch of life undimmed, to the 
next generation. Of some such character will be 
the religion of the future. 

The study of the continuance of the race, its 
mechanisms and the dangers and perils to which 
it is exposed is as fascinating as it is vital and 
important. We can best, and indeed only, study 
ourselves in our ancestry, and the most important 
use we can make of this knowledge is to benefit our 
offspring. It is a good thing to " Know Thyself , " 
but much better to know thy children, for they are 
young and plastic, and not past mending. It is often 
difficult to get properly acquainted with yourself until 
it is too late for the knowledge to do you much good. 
We cannot exercise much choice in the selection of 
our parents, but we can in those of our children. 

The methods by which the torch of life is handed 
down from one generation to the next are of a 
singular simplicity and beauty, although in some 
of their more elaborate forms at first sight, ap- 
parently complex. The fundamental process is 
exactly the same in all the myriad forms of life, 
from the ameba to man, namely, the division of 
one cell into two halves. In the simplest forms 
the one-roomed house of life, where the body con- 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 213 

sists of but a single cell, the organism never dies, 
but simply grows as big as it can, and then cuts 
itself in two, making two cells, where but one was 
before. The creature divides itself into two equal 
parts, both of which "live happy ever after." It is 
in fact immortal. 

Only when the body has reached the complexity of 
a colony of cells with division of labour among them, 
does death appear on the scene. Then a single cell, 
or small group of cells, is budded off from the side of 
the old and decaying body to start a new life of its 
own. Thus as has been picturesquely expressed, 
"Death is the price paid for a body." By either of 
these methods, splitting or budding a single animal, 
consisting of a cell or small group of cells, can go on 
reproducing itself indefinitely; but by the time the 
process has reached fifty or a hundred generations, 
its energy begins to slacken, and its power of drink- 
ing in the life-giving sun-current from its surround- 
ings begins to wane. It gets stale and jaded and 
feeble, and unless new life can be added from 
some source, it will die out and disappear. If, 
however, one of these cells should happen to meet a 
foreign, or unrelated cell, and by a curious reversal 
of the multiplication process the two unite and fuse 
together to become one cell, then the process of 
reproduction starts up again with primitive vigour, 
and continues luxuriantly for another one hundred 
generations. 



214 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

This is the birth of sex, and the higher and the 
more complicated the organism becomes the greater 
and more absolutely vital becomes the necessity 
of conjugation, or the combining of one cell with 
another in order to produce a third. 

The next step is the budding off of a few germ 
cells on purpose to form a new organism and these 
are of two sorts: cells of the male type, and cells 
of the female type. Both of these are at first 
produced by the same organism, and each is in- 
capable of reproducing on its own account, but must 
combine with its counterpart of the opposite sex 
in order to become fertile. In spite of this di- 
vision of labour however, the female cell still re- 
tains traces of its pristine power of unaided repro- 
duction on its own account. This was brilliantly 
shown a few years ago in the experiments of Loeb, 
who, by adjusting the temperature and salt percen- 
tage of sea water, succeeded in making the un- 
fertilized eggs of both the sea-urchin and star-fish 
begin to develop into larvae, and reach the first 
stage of reproductive growth. 

In the earliest forms of race-continuing experi- 
ments, when she was "trying her 'prentice hand," 
as it were, Nature simply did the easiest thing 
first and arranged for the production of both male 
and female germ cells by the same individual, 
so that originally all animals were bi-sexual. This 
may seem like a very far cry from the twentieth 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 215 

century, but so long and obstinately did Nature 
muddle along with this clumsy method of rejuve- 
nating the race stream at each generation, that it 
became stamped deeply into the very fibre of our 
beings, and even to-day the most highly specialized 
animals carry in their bodies the germs and partially 
developed rudiments of all the structures belonging 
to both sexes. If one set of these rudiments de- 
velops to full completion, the individual becomes 
of one sex; if those of the other sex so develop, of 
the opposite. But so alive and full of possibilities 
are both these sets of rudiments that if by any chance 
or accident the germ glands of an individual become 
impaired or diseased, then both sets of rudiments 
begin to develop together, producing often strange 
and fantastic hybrids between the two genders. 
Some of these unused rudiments — which of course 
have nothing to do and like all idle members of the 
community are apt to get into mischief — play 
quite an important role in pathology and become 
the site of troublesome and even serious disturbances. 
But, after a few million years of experience with 
this method of reviving the race stream, it was 
found, by some lucky accident, that if the germ cell 
produced by one individual happened to combine 
with a germ cell produced by another individual, 
instead of with one of its brothers or sisters, the 
result was a much more vigorous and enterprising 
new generation. 



216 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

Animals born of such "foreign'' unions, inheriting 
the best of both parental streams and stimulated 
to new life by the admixture of different strains 
were so much sturdier and more enterprising 
than the offspring of the old " marriage within 
the family" matings, that they gradually exter- 
minated them upon their own levels, or climbed 
above them to higher ones. So that for many 
millions of years past only those unambitious and 
indolent creatures which were content to remain 
at the bottom, or on the two or three lower steps 
of the Jacob's ladder of animal life, such as the 
sea anemones, the starfish, the molluscs, shell- 
fish and the worms, have retained the old clumsy 
and primitive method of producing germ cells of 
both sexes in the same individual. And even the 
most enterprising and progressive class of these, 
the worms, the only ones who really "get anywhere, " 
in the sense of becoming the ancestors of higher 
forms of life, including ourselves — for we are 
literally "worms of the dust" in an even deeper 
and more fundamental sense than that intended 
by the Psalmist — although they still keep up 
the production of both kinds of germ cells, take care 
that the gonads produced by one individual are 
quickened, not by their brother or sister cells, but 
by the gonads of another individual. 

This interesting intermediate state of affairs is most 
familiar to us and was first discovered in flowering 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 217 

plants, most of which possess, as is well known, 
both male gonads, or anthers with their pollen, 
and female gonads or pistils with their ovules, but 
which take, so to speak, the greatest pains by 
means of brilliantly coloured blossoms, powerful 
perfumes, honey and other sweets, to ensure the 
fertilization of their pistils by pollen from some other 
flower, carried upon the wings and legs of some 
honey-loving insect. 

Flowers are splendid advertisers and literally 
"spread themselves" to attract their insect-cus- 
tomers: they are in fact the earliest prototypes 
of the much maligned yellow journalism, red type, 
pink paper, huge headlines and all, for they flaunt 
their notices of bargain sales, "positively for this 
day only," in all the colours of the rainbow — crim- 
son and silver and purple and blue and gold. If, to 
blow one's own horn, in all the loudest tones of the 
"chromatic" scale be immodest, then flowers 
"in the days of innocence" were the first offenders, 
not man "in the days of villainy," as FalstafT 
pathetically pleads. As they have no circulation, 
in fact are billboard posters and wallpapers 
rather than newspapers, and their life is of the 
shortest, they are obliged to exert to the utmost 
every art of display and of attraction; and to this we 
owe that superb and gorgeous pageantry of glowing 
colour, of exquisite form, of delicious perfume which 
fills the meadows and woodlands every spring. 



218 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

It is an interesting illustration of the essential 
and inherent beauty and charm and purity of sex 
that to it and its influences alone we owe all the 
beauty of flowers, the vivid and brilliant plumage 
of birds, the rapturous melody of their songs, 
the velvety splendour of the coats of animals, the 
beauty of their forms, the poetry of their motion 
and the majesty of their bearing. The painted 
splendours of the butterfly's wing, the meteor- 
glow of the firefly, the exquisite beauty and deli- 
cate charm of woman spring from the same source. 
In fact little that we know and delight in of colour 
and outline, of musical tone, the whole arts of 
painting, of sculpture, of music, of architecture, of 
dress and the drama, and the best part of religion 
would ever have come into existence without it. 
A fair half of all that makes life delightful and 
ennobling and wholesome springs from this noble 
source. 

If any instinct that stirs the breast of man can 
claim to be elevating and holy, it is the one which 
concerns itself with the life and the continuance 
of the race. It is the first impulse which lifts man 
outside of himself, the very basis of all altruism and 
devotion and the mother of all the gentler virtues, 
love, affection and kindliness. Yet the ascetics 
of all ages, being themselves ugly and cowardly 
and filthy, have hated the race-instinct because 
it was beautiful and brave and clean. As they 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 219 

were unfortunately our first teachers and writers 
they have so persistently vilified this noble impulse 
that they have succeeded in persuading us into 
regarding it as one of the lowest and most disgrace- 
ful and bestial in our nature. The mere mention or 
discussion of its processes and mechanisms is re- 
garded as immodest and indecent, and their very 
existence is officially ignored. 

An imitation virtue called modesty has been 
called into existence for this very purpose, and 
as the bird of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, is 
the owl, so the bird of modesty, the goddess of 
prudery, is the ostrich, with its head in the sand. 
We have allowed the mere facts that this impulse 
is possessed by the animals, that it is at times 
of overmastering power, and that like any other 
natural impulse it may be followed to injurious 
extremes, to blind us to the fact that it is the basis 
and beginning of not merely conjugal but also 
maternal and filial affection, in fact, of the family 
and all the softening and ennobling influences that 
cluster around it; and upon the family is built 
the state, the nation, and the world of civilization 
and progress. 

Instead of being, as we have been falsely taught, 
one of the most blindly selfish and ruthless of im- 
pulses, it is only the natural and instinctive im- 
pulse of man, whose aim is the existence and welfare 
of others than himself. The mere fact that it is 



220 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

of animal origin counts to-day in its favour instead 
of against it, for the study of origins has given our 
pride a sad but well-deserved fall by showing us 
that three fourths of our virtues have been inherited 
from the animals, while an equal share of our 
vices have been invented by ourselves. The dove 
on her nest, the dog on the grave of his master, 
and the tigress daring all odds in defence of her 
cubs, are as pure and touching pictures of love, 
of devotion and faithfulness unto death as those 
of any haloed saint or legendary martyr, and far 
more beautiful to look upon and more wholesome 
to imitate. 

The haphazard, unspecialized, jack-of-all-trades 
condition of affairs of letting the same organism 
produce both male and female cells and leaving 
the offspring to shift for themselves was soon to 
be abandoned for better and more workmanlike 
methods. The first great step in advance was the 
production, not merely of two kinds of germ cells 
but of two different kinds of individual, each of 
which was to produce one kind of cell. This had 
the great and obvious advantage of first insuring 
a mixture of the strains, and second of allowing 
each type of germ cell to become specialized and 
thus better fitted for carrying out the part it has 
to play. A curious difference in size begins to 
manifest itself at once, ova, or female cells, ap- 
parently robbing the male cells of their share of 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 221 

nutrition and becoming from ten to twenty times 
larger than their partners, while the latter shrank 
in like proportion. This is where the subjection 
and comparative insignificance of man began — and 
has continued ever since. 

At first the individuals who produced the two 
different types of cells remained exactly similar 
in size and appearance, as they do to this day, 
for instance, in the vast majority of fishes, snakes, 
tortoises, alligators and other reptiles. But it 
was not long before advantage began to be taken 
of this division of labour to specialize and advance 
still further, and the organisms which produced 
the female germ cells, or ova (eggs) began to assume 
certain characters which fitted them better for the 
part which they had to play, in fact became female; 
while those which produced the male cells, on the 
other hand, assumed other distinctive characters 
which marked them as males. 

The differences between the two sexes for a long 
time, however, remained comparatively slight. It 
is impossible for the untrained eye to distinguish 
between the male and female of most fishes, and 
even an expert will often have much difficulty in 
deciding without making a dissection. As a rule 
the female is slightly the larger and somewhat 
the duller-coloured of the two, and apt to be more 
sluggish in her movements and more retiring in 
her habits, so as to avoid the attack of natural 



222 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

enemies. The male, on the other hand, though 
smaller and brighter-coloured, begins to display 
the true masculine qualities of aggressiveness, 
pugnacity and vanity. But all things taken to- 
gether, the sexes are far more equal at this time 
than they have been since, or ever will be again 
— until the suffragettes win their fight. 

This monotonous and uninteresting state of affairs 
exists until another factor comes into play, and that 
is the first beginnings of care for the young. Hith- 
erto, with a few rare exceptions, the young, whether 
split, bud, sexless new cell, or fertilized ovum, have 
been simply turned adrift in the water or upon 
the earth to shift for themselves. In the simplest 
and most primitive form of reproduction, of course, 
the cutting themselves in two of the one-celled 
organisms, like the ameba, the white corpuscles 
of our blood, the parasite of malaria, etc., there 
can be no question of parental care. Indeed it 
would have taken all the casuistry of the school- 
men to decide which of the two new cells was 
mother and which was daughter, and the question 
of seniority between them would ever remain 
as insoluble as that of the age of Ann. In fact 
here is where the eternal uncertainty as to the 
precise age of woman began — it would all de- 
pend upon which was separated first, when the 
maternal cell cut itself in two. 

The animals which bud off their young from their 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 223 

sides are naturally as indifferent to their future 
welfare and as incapable of furthering it as the 
plants which they so closely resemble. So that 
it is not until the sexes become entirely separate 
and are so well able to take care of themselves as 
to have some energy and skill to spare for their 
young that the beginnings of parental care first 
appear. It is true that certain worms lay their 
eggs in packages or capsules and appear to take 
a kind of vague interest in them until they are 
hatched; and some of the crustaceans, such as the 
lobster and crayfish, attach their eggs by a tena- 
cious gummy substance to the concave under-sur- 
face of their powerful swimming-tails, where they 
remain until the young are hatched. But with 
these exceptions it is not until we come rather high 
up among the fishes, in the salmon and the sunfish 
tribes for instance, that definite, purposeful parental 
care begins to show itself. 

Oddly enough it first shows itself most actively 
and definitely in the male, so that the proud and 
haughty claim so often put forward by the superior 
sex that motherhood is an older and far higher 
function than fatherhood is not as well founded 
as might be desired. The mother does not even 
build the first nest, for this office is undertaken 
for practically the first time in the animal king- 
dom by the male salmon, who, in that singular 
spawning pilgrimage up from the deep sea — the 



224 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

oldest and most sacred pilgrimage on record — 
swims two or three days ahead of the female up 
the rivers and streams until a suitable spawning 
ground is reached. As soon as this is reached he 
picks out a clean, gravelly bar at the foot of a 
rapid, and energetically scoops out with his snout 
a basin-like nest or spawning bed, carefully re- 
moving all the larger stones and coarser gravel 
so that a smooth, even bed of fine gravel remains. 
This he vigorously defends against all other males, 
if he be big and strong enough, until the arrival 
of the females, when he proceeds to fight for and 
"cut out of the bunch" the lady of his choice, who 
thereupon deposits the precious layer of eggs upon 
the smooth, gravelly surface he has provided. 

When she has done this she becomes a fine lady 
at once and takes no further care of her offspring, 
but the anxious and devoted father, after carefully 
fertilizing the eggs, stands, or swims, guard over 
them day and night, fighting away any other 
salmon who would invade his domain, and especially 
their greatest enemy the speckled brook trout, 
whose favourite and most appetizing dish is an 
omelette of salmon's eggs au naturel. For which 
greediness, by the way, he is punished with most 
poetic justice, as the higher fishman baits his 
trout-hooks with these tempting morsels, with 
most killing effect. 

The same domestic virtues are displayed by the 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 225 

common sunfish, or "pumpkin-seed," of our ponds 
and rivers. So plucky is he that he will sometimes 
even attack your hand, or the tip of your fishing 
rod if it approaches his treasure too closely, and a 
pretty sight he makes with his spines erect and all 
his colours flashing in the sun as he dashes hither 
and thither to repel all invaders. So, while it may 
be true that no man can make a home, it is not 
true that no male can. Upon primitive biological 
grounds it would appear that man ought to be the 
head of the house, but of course "nous avons change 
tout cela" long ago. The giddy, pleasure-loving 
mamma and the hard-working, domestic "poor papa" 
are exceedingly venerable institutions biologically 

When once this division of labour in the care 
of the young has been fairly established, the two 
sexes become rapidly and markedly different. 
Though they remain for the most part nearly equal 
in size and weight, the male becomes the stronger 
and more aggressive of the two and usually better 
provided with weapons of attack and defence, 
such as teeth, horns, etc., to fit him for the duty 
of defending the female and young from attack 
and of capturing and bringing home food. The 
female, on the other hand, becomes more vege- 
tative and receptive in her temperament, quieter 
in her colouring and her habits, so as to escape 
notice and attack when brooding upon the aest 
or caring for the young. The sexes now become 



226 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

for the first time easily distinguishable even to 
the causal eye, and the stage is illustrated in 
the great majority of birds, a few of the higher 
reptiles, and a considerable part of the insects. 
Eggs are still deposited and fertilized outside of 
the body and hatched by the heat of the sun, the 
water or the earth. 

In one rather striking particular the difference 
between the sexes is just the opposite of what we 
would, upon modern grounds, have expected; 
and that is that practically all the decorations 
characteristic of sex — the secondary sexual char- 
acters as they are termed — are possessed by the 
male. And this singular and most unjust dis- 
crimination on nature's part is maintained not 
only through the whole of this stage, but up 
though to the highest of them all, until finally, at 
the human level, women win the rights which they 
now imagine have been theirs since the begin- 
ning. To the male alone belong the splendid 
plumage, the glowing colours, the piercing melody 
of song among birds — the nightingale, that floods 
the moonlit glades with her song, by the way, is 
not a "she" but a "he"; and it is the male that 
wears the magnificent horns and antlers, the splen- 
did crests and manes, the most glistening satin and 
velvet of coats and furs, the whitest ivory tusks, 
and gains the highest triumphs of both speed and 
strength among animals. Man is fundamentally 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 227 

and really the ornamental sex and always retained 
his rights up to the very beginning of civilization, 
when they began gradually to be wrested from 
him by the other sex, which has now acquired a 
complete monopoly of them. If it comes to a 
question of lost rights and liberties it is man who 
should agitate for emancipation rather than woman. 
Woman, not content with usurping all of man's 
ancient rights, now demands his modern ones as 
well, and she'll get them too: she always ' .arrives," 
as the French say. 

Here we reach the summit and perfection of the 
mechanisms of race continuance so far as the 
parents are concerned — a father who fights and 
forages and a mother who feeds and protects. 
In fact nowhere is there to be found a more beau- 
tiful picture of parental devotion and family life 
than in the famous and now pillar-of-the-church 
"birds in their little nests." In passing it might 
be remarked, as a matter of cold biological fact, 
they do not "agree" at all, but squabble furiously 
and shamelessly for the next turn at the dish of 
worm or caterpillar which is being passed round, 
and shoulder one another out of the nest with the 
most majority-stockholder heartlessness as soon 
as they are strong enough. The young cuckoo in 
the nest is not the moral monster that he is made 
out to be. Any other fledgling that could get 
as far ahead of his brothers in size and strength 



228 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

would do the same. Birdlings, like certain nest- 
lings of higher degree, are little more than hunger 
incarnate, and know no other law. 

Both father and mother bird take part in the 
nest building, in which, however, the male is only 
a hod-carrier, roundly bullied and " bossed about" 
by the directing female, "just like folks," as Eugene 
Wood says. 

Both the parents take an active part in the incu- 
bation of the eggs and divide the really appalling 
labour of "rustling" food for the young. 

But here they stop and a much less picturesque 
and attractive group of living creatures take up 
the thread of race continuance and carry it on 
to its highest perfection — the mammals, or "ani- 
mals" proper. They take up the process where 
the birds left it, so to speak, and proceed to develop 
it along a side line which had hitherto been almost 
neglected, and that is the careful and loving special- 
ization and perfection of the place where the young 
are to be incubated or hatched. Traces of this 
preparation begin, of course, at a very early age 
in the history of life; in fact, it is, as in all other 
stages of the process, the logical development 
of a beautifully simple and rational idea. Some 
fishes, as we have seen, prepare nests in the bed 
of the stream and watch over the eggs while hatch- 
ing. Snakes seek out a hollow in the ground, 
preferably upon some sunny bank, where their 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 229 

eggs can be hatched by the heat of the sun. Turtles 
come up on the tropical seashore and scoop great 
holes in the warm sand in which to deposit their 
bushel of eggs. Birds of course have their nests in 
which the young, no longer left to the casual rays 
of the sun, are hatched by the brooding warmth of 
the mother's body. 

But it was millions and millions of years before 
the simple and beautifully sensible idea appears 
to have presented itself to any creature that the 
safest, the most appropriate and logical nest for 
the hatching of the eggs was where they were 
originally budded off, within the body of the mother. 
Finally, some Miles Standish-like mother-creature 
adopted the motto, "If you want a thing done well, 
do it yourself," and concluded that hatching, 
unlike charity, should not only begin but end at 
home. This of course necessitated the fertiliza- 
tion of the eggs without their leaving the body 
of the mother, but when this problem was once 
solved a perfectly superb power of extension was 
given to parental care and consequent perfection 
of development of the young. 

How enormously valuable and far-reaching this 
new idea was may be seen by the fact that even 
to this day the rank of an animal in the scale 
of organized life runs curiously parallel to the 
length of time which it has been incubated in the 
body of the mother. The perfection of any animal, 



230 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

including man, depends largely on the length of 
time that has been spent in hatching him. If he 
comes out of the maternal incubator one tenth 
hatched, as it were, he is a fish; if half hatched, 
a bird or reptile; if three quarters hatched, a 
marsupial mammal, and if fully hatched, a car- 
nivore, ungulate or primate. No other animal 
of his size and weight is hatched more than half 
as long as man is, except his double first cousins, 
the anthropoid apes. 

Many of the creatures display an astonishing 
amount of intelligence over the solution of this 
problem before settling it within themselves. Cer- 
tain birds, like the ostrich, for instance, as is 
well known, lay their eggs where the heat of the 
sun is convenient for their development in the 
daytime, and only sit on them at night. Some 
birds, like the famous brush-turkey of New Guinea, 
actually reach such a hen-wife stage of intelligence 
as to build huge nests, or mounds, of decaying 
vegetable material, in the middle of which they 
deposit their eggs to be hatched by the heat given 
off in the process of decay, exactly as the Egyptian 
chicken-farmer of to-day builds his stack of straw 
and horse-manure and buries his basket «of eggs 
in the centre to be hatched by the heat of its 
"sweating." But the beautiful simplicity of mak- 
ing the body of the mother the incubator dawned 
late on the animal mind. 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 231 

Hazy glimmerings of the idea appear very far 
back indeed and some of them take to our eyes 
singular and even grotesque forms. In the first 
place, some of the earliest and crudest experi- 
ments in this direction were made, not by the mother 
but by the father. In other words, to use a Hi- 
bernicism, fathers were the first mothers. 

The very earliest rudiments of attempts at self- 
hatching of the eggs among vertebrates occurs 
in certain forms of fishes, notably the toad-fish of 
our southern Atlantic coast, as discovered and 
most painstakingly worked out by Gudger, in 
which the male fish scoops into his enormous mouth 
the eggs as they are laid by the female and, tucking 
them into his cheek-pouches, i. e., certain recesses 
which develop between his gill-clefts, shelters them, 
not in the hollow of his hand, but of his mouth, 
until they are fully hatched. Fancy going aoout 
with a mouthful like that through half your summer 
— no wonder man developed into the silent sex! ! 

The next stumble in this direction was also due 
to male initiative and came a little higher up in 
the scale, in those familiar but unattractive creatures, 
the toads, who should be given great credit for it 
and really are entitled to "wear this precious 
jewel in their crowns." In the species which 
bears the proud and appropriate name of Alytes 
obstetricans the eggs are laid in long strings by 
the female and picked up by the male, who winds 



232 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

them round and round his body, especially under 
his armpits and round his waist, and thus en- 
swathed squats about in nice moist corners until 
the young toadlets burst from their coverings and 
hop away. 

Another most ingenious gentleman of the same 
family, but of a widely different species, the Suri- 
nam toad, has "a brain on him" like a Standard 
Oil magnate, for he actually first conceived the 
brilliant idea of suggesting to the dull mind of 
womankind that she might take a part in the 
process, for which original conception he is en- 
titled to a monument of triple brass from the grateful 
and admiring males of all species that have come 
after him. Think what would have been our lot 
if the whole burden of incubation had been thrown 
upon our shoulders as it began to be, instead of 
deftly shifted by this Napoleonic mind on to the 
broader and much more capable shoulders of the 
female. We had better give the ladies what they 
want in the way of trifles like the ballot at the 
earliest moment consistent with saving our faces 
lest they "become exasperated and demand a return 
to first principles and emancipation in this regard 
also. 

This gentleman from Surinam, after, probably, 
having worn an undershirt of sticky eggs about 
as long as he cared to, hit upon the bright idea 
of handing the work back to the female, and one 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 233 

day — probably when she wasn't looking — peeled 
off a few of the eggs and poked them slyly in be- 
tween some loose folds of skin on her back. The 
scheme worked admirably — for the male and 
the tadpoles — and the female apparently didn't 
much mind it, but submitted to the imposition, 
until to-day in this species it is the fixed and regular 
habit of the male to pick up the eggs as they are 
laid by the female, with his fore-paws, and poke 
them into scores of little pouches which have de- 
veloped all over the skin of the female's back. 
Here the youngsters comfortably remain until 
their hatching is completed, when the mother 
toad bursts out into an eruption, like a sort of 
giant small-pox, and literally perspires tadpoles 
at every pore. 

After these two Newtonian thinkers comes a long, 
long gap, and it is not until quite high up in the 
snakes, at the very top of the serpentine tree, 
in fact — and then apparently because the males 
were not intelligent enough to volunteer to act as 
pioneers — that the eggs came to be delayed long 
enough in the body of the mother before being 
laid to undergo more or less complete develop- 
ment. The name of the famous viper, for instance, 
which is now a household word, is simply a con- 
traction of vivipara, literally " alive-borning, " from 
the fact that the eggs were delayed so long in the 
body of the mother before being laid that some 



234 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

of the embryos hatched under cover and others 
within a few days of having been deposited in 
their underground nest. 

And since the process has been carefully studied 
it has been found that the eggs of many snakes 
are laid with their contained "chickens" in quite 
an advanced stage of development, so that it 
is quite difficult to get snakes' eggs for purposes of 
embryological study in any but the latest stages of 
development. In fact, in not a few snakes' eggs, 
when they are broken for the purpose of making 
an omelette, you find the youngsters sufficiently 
grown up to crawl away, and if they happen to 
belong to a venomous species and you try to stop 
them they will coil up and strike at you with all 
the viciousness of Medusa's locks. This is the 
most appalling — and only — instance of Original 
Sin to be found in the animal kingdom; and from 
the point of view of the snakelets it is of course 
you who are the sinner. 

There was a dim foreshadowing of this method 
even farther down our family tree among certain 
perch-like fishes of the Pacific Ocean, among whom 
some of the mothers retain the eggs in their bodies 
until the young fry are hatched and ready to swim. 
But this appears to have been, so to speak, little 
more than oriental inertia on the part of the mother 
and led nowhere, so far as further perfection of 
the process was concerned. 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 235 

It was not until Time's noblest product, the 
last, and so far — until the Superman comes — 
highest, branch and crown of our family tree is 
reached, the mammals, or warm-blooded crea- 
tures, covered with fur and nursing their young, 
at home, so to speak, is universally adopted and 
carried to full perfection. It is now so familiar 
to us on every hand, so simple, so logical, so " nat- 
ural" as we say, that it is difficult for us to believe 
that it took at least ten or fifteen millions of years 
from the beginnings of life to reach this wonderful 
and beautiful method of race-continuation, and 
from two to four million years more to elaborate 
and perfect the idea. 

Even among the earliest mammals the process 
is evidently still in the experimental stage. Up 
to a little more than a century ago it was generally 
supposed that the earliest forms of mammals were 
the marsupials, or pouched animals, so called from 
their carrying their young during infancy in a 
curious pouch of skin developed on the anterior 
surface of their bodies. But with the discovery 
of the Lost Continent of Australia, which had 
been suddenly cut off by the ocean from the rest 
of the earth's surface, while its animal inhabitants 
were all in their most primitive forms, came the 
uncovering to our astonished gaze, not merely 
of scores and hundreds of new species of mar- 
supials, but also of two or three small groups of 



236 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

even more primitive and extraordinary mammals, 
covered with fur, armed with claws and teeth, 
and in almost every respect resembling some of 
our smaller burrowing animals, which actually 
made nests and laid eggs. One of them, the now 
famous duck-mole, or duck-billed platypus, to make 
the weird resemblance to a bird even more striking, 
had, as his name implies, a bill like a duck. 

The full imperial title of this oldest Father of 
Men is Ornithorhyncus paradoxus vel anatinus, 
the most interesting and important single creature 
that ever lived, as worthy of veneration and worship 
as any Greek philosopher or Roman emperor. 
Another species was also found with the same 
singular habit of egg-laying, the spiny Echidna, 
a small animal closely resembling a hedge-hog 
or a porcupine. By the side of their classic an- 
tiquity the great pyramid becomes as modern as 
a sewing-machine. 

Both Echidna and duck-mole, however, have 
the root of the matter in them and are on the up- 
grade toward full mammalianism, as they both 
occasionally retain the eggs within their bodies 
until they are upon the point of hatching, and 
both tenderly care for and nurse their young. 

It remained, however, for the next grade of animal 
life, the marsupials, to take the last important 
and almost final step in the direction of the nur- 
ture of the young by substituting for a large egg 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 237 

crammed with yoke and white to supply food for 
the embryo during its growth, and enclosed by 
a leathery, horny, or chalky shell, a very small 
germ cell with only a few drops of yolk food, sur- 
rounded by a thin and delicate envelope, through 
which it can draw its nourishment directly from the 
blood of the mother while remaining within her 
body. 

The point at which the germ cell is, so to speak, 
grafted on to the interior of the body of the mother 
is called the placenta, and the coil of blood vessels 
which form between this and the body of the de- 
veloping embryo to supply it with nourishment 
is known as the umbilical cord, from the fact that 
it enters the body of the embryo at the centre 
of its anterior surface. But even their courage 
seems to have failed them, so to speak, in the very- 
middle of the process, for instead of allowing the 
young, called at this stage the embryo, to grow and 
develop within the body of the mother, fed from 
her tissues through the veins of the umbilical 
cord, until it is completely developed and able to 
shift for itself, they turn it out less than half hatched, 
as it were. 

The young kangaroo, for instance, is born at a 
stage about corresponding to the third or fourth 
month of human embryonic development, then 
picked up by the mother and stowed away safely 
in her marsupial pouch. Here it finds the nipple 



238 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

of the milk-gland and at once grasps it firmly with 
the only muscle of its body that is thoroughly 
developed, i. e., the constrictor, or ring-muscle 
of the mouth and lips. It attaches itself per- 
manently, and the tip of the nipple expands within 
its mouth so that the embryo could not let go 
if it would and is thus literally "buttoned on" 
to its source of supply for several weeks, until 
its mouth has again grown larger than the end of 
the nipple and it disengages itself and begins to 
poke its head out of the pouch to see the world. 

This curious bit of life-history, though interesting 
enough as a transition stage, would at first sight 
appear to be of mere academic interest were it not 
for the almost incredible fact that it has left its 
mark upon the throat structure of every mammal 
since. If you will open your own mouth wide 
before the mirror you will see hanging down from 
the centre of your palate a curious little tongue- 
like process about half an inch long, known as the 
uvula. It is of no earthly utility now, except to 
make a nuisance of itself by getting inflamed, 
swelling and sagging down until it tickles the 
larynx and makes us cough, and then furnishing 
a fee to the laryngologist for its amputation. In 
the young marsupials, however, and in our own 
embryos at about the fifth month, and in the young 
sucklings of several animals, notably the horse, 
this uvula is a broad, square-tipped curtain of 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 239 

muscle hanging down from the palate and grasping 
firmly the epiglottis, or shield of gristle, which 
stands up in front of the opening of the larynx, 
or voice-box. When this connection has been 
established, it allows a continual stream to flow 
down the throat on either side of the opening of 
the windpipe, without any effort on the part of the 
youngster and without any danger of his choking. 

Nature never forgets an old trick, and this 
curious waterproof continuous passage down the 
throat on either side of the windpipe revives again 
in all its perfection in the throat of the young 
of a very far-wandered mammal, the whale. This 
creature, living in the water, but warm-blooded 
and nursing its young like any other mammal, 
must arrange for the swallowing of the milk by 
the latter by some other means than suction, as 
this requires a drawing in of a fresh supply of air. 
Nature meets this emergency by providing the 
young whale with this waterproof palate-larynx 
combination, and the milk-gland of the mother 
with a compressor-muscle which squirts the liquid 
in a steady stream down the youngster's throat. 

But with the discovery by some either more or 
less enterprising than usual kangaroo-mother that 
it was "just as good, and far less trouble," to carry 
the embryo on to its full stage of development at 
home without bothering herself with a pouch and 
its exceedingly heavy and troublesome burden 



2 4 o WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

— for the young "Joey-kangaroo" stays in his 
pouch and is carried about, like a young lord in 
liis carriage, until he is nearly one third as big 
as his mother — the final and perfected stage of 
the race-continuing process was reached. Final, 
that is, unless Science, in response to the woman's 
demands for complete emancipation from the 
burdens and responsibilities of sex, invents some 
wonderfully devised and perfect incubator in which 
the human embryo can be hatched as chickens 
are now, and desirable human strains may be 
combined and propagated outside of] the body 
freely and with complete indifference to sentimental 
and conventional considerations. 

The only changes from this on have been a gradual 
lengthening of the period of incubation or internal 
care of the young, which has expanded from the 
six or seven days of the early mammalian forms 
to the nine, ten or eleven months of the highest 
forms. This has been found apparently the longest 
period consistent with the welfare of the species, 
the limit being probably due to the fact that any 
further extension of the period would involve 
the bearing of the young by the mother for more 
than a year and consequently through two seasonal 
periods of hardship and famine, winter or summer 
as the case may be, which would be too great a 
risk. 

It is worth while noting perhaps that the breed- 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 24X 

ing season, or time of birth, of the young in animals 
almost universally corresponds with that period 
of the year at which food for the mother will be 
most abundant during the nursing period, or at which 
there will be the best supply of food, or the best 
climatic conditions for the young as soon as they 
begin to forage for themselves. Fawns and the 
calves of wild cattle, for instance, are born in the 
very early spring, so that there will be an abundant 
supply of grass for the mothers at the time when 
the strain of nursing will begin to tell and also for 
the youngsters when they begin to browse. 

But even this lengthening of the time is not 
sufficient to allow of the care and training which 
is needed for the development of the very best and 
most successful types of "children"; so to meet 
this, the period of infancy, or time of dependence 
on the parents after birth, is even more markedly 
increased. 

The young of the lower animals are born like 
those of the lower birds (ostriches, chickens, etc.), 
with all their wits and senses about them, ready 
to run and look out for themselves almost from 
birth. But as we rise in the scale, the young at 
birth gradually become more and more helpless. 
Young birds are born with their eyes closed and 
destitute of feathers, young mammals half blind, 
without any fur or hairy coating, and capable of 
doing little but crawl and whimper; and finally 



242 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

the human infant is born with his eyes open, it 
is true, much to the surprise of Landseer and other 
dog-loving bachelors, but without a particle of 
natural protection in the way of furry clothing, 
and so helpless and dependent that he is unable 
to walk or stand alone for a year or more, and 
does not arrive at full maturity until he is twenty- 
five years old. 

With this step education is born, which means 
much to the child, and even more to the parents 
and to the community. The child is the greatest 
teacher ever born, and it is no mere mystic figure 
of speech that in the upward march of civilization 
" a little child shall lead them." The true millen- 
nium is just dawning — the Day of the Child. 
War marked the day of the Man, religion the day 
of the Woman, with the Day of the Child will 
come the service and the brotherhood of man. 
When we recognize that our highest allegiance is 
to the Child, the coming generation, as represent- 
ing the future of the race, then Heaven will "come 
true" upon earth, and we won't have to die to 
reach it. 

Man, so far as his bodily structure and functions 
are concerned, is but the highest, the most ex- 
quisitely contrived and the most beautiful of the 
animals. Small wonder that the mating impulse, 
which secures the continuance of the race, should 
exercise an influence over his emotions and con- 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 243 

duct which is powerful in proportion to its dignity 
and profound importance. But there is no need 
to exaggerate the power of its sway, either for good 
or for evil, as is usually done. Notwithstanding 
the ecstatic paeons of the poet and the trouba- 
dour on the one hand, and the equally unbalanced 
reprobations and denunciations of the priest and 
the moralist upon the other, it is extremely doubtful, 
as a matter of cold biological fact, whether the 
mating impulse, or romantic love, ever at any 
period of life controls or dominates more than 
one tenth of the activities and conduct of man- 
kind. Venus, the goddess of perpetual romantic 
love, at one end of the scale, and the Vestal Virgin, 
or the nun, as the emblem of perpetual frigidity 
and renunciation, at the other, are both equally 
untrue to life and abnormal; and both deeply 
tinged with insanity. 

In the first place, probably not more than one 
man or woman in ten is capable of developing 
a really high class attack of the " grande passion," 
such as would be fit to go into a novel or become 
the subject of a poem. Secondly, the vast ma- 
jority of men and women fall in love, or imagine 
themselves to be so, which is the same thing, not 
once and forever, so that they will be blighted 
beings ever after if they fail to win the prize, but 
ten, or a dozen times, once or more a year in fact, 
all through their salad days, until the " right per- 



244 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

son" comes along and puts an end to the continuous 
performance by marrying them. Then of course 
this was the only case of "true" love, all the others 
being mere imitations. Whereas, as a matter of 
fact, any one of the preceding attacks, third, seventh, 
or ninth, as the case may be, would have proved 
just as "true" if it had happened to end in mar- 
riage. 

The ease with which boys and girls fall in love 
is only equalled by the exquisite facility with which 
they fall out again; and there is never need for any 
one to lose their sense of proportion and humour 
and imagine that their lives will forever after be 
a blank and a desert drear if they cannot get the 
particular person for their life partner who hap- 
pens to embody for them all the charms and the 
virtues of the opposite sex in that particular week 
of the May or June of their life. 

In fact, it should never be forgotten by those 
under the sway of this impulse, first, that when 
this attack passes they will probably have several 
others, equally severe and enjoyable, and, second, 
that as nature has laid down through all the aeons 
of the past and will quickly teach them in the bitter 
school of experience, if they are blind to her warn- 
ings, the real purpose and meaning of this im- 
pulse is not the enjoyment or necessarily the happi- 
ness of the individual, although this is usually 
enormously increased and best secured thereby, 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 245 

but the welfare of the race and the interests of the 
next generation. 

The only considerations which ought to be 
allowed to influence our choice of a partner for 
life are those rising out of the fitness, physical, 
mental and moral, of the object of our affections 
to be the father, or mother, of our children. If 
we can feel sure upon this point, then it is usually 
safe to follow our impulses with little regard to 
what others may think. 

No other consideration should count in this 
greatest throw in the game of life, and when a 
real man marries a true woman, whom he both 
loves and can respect, happiness and success are 
nearly sure to follow, regardless of race, rank, 
social position, or money. The charm and at- 
traction of man for woman and woman for man 
are so infinite and inexhaustible, they meet and fill 
each other's needs and requirements in such a 
multitude of ways and such myriads of aspects 
of life, that if they but join hands upon a basis 
of mutual affection and repect, with good char- 
acter, good health and good temper, and the dis- 
parity between their ages and dispositions be not 
abnormally great, nine times out of ten they will 
both congratulate themselves upon their good 
fortune until the day of their death. 

Although there are plenty of delightful instances 
of love at first sight which burns without wavering 



246 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

or fading "until death doth part," yet these form 
but nature's high and chosen aristocracy of love; 
and the main thing for all youths and maidens 
to remember is that if they refuse to accept an 
unfit mate, no matter how attractive or how 
rich or how titled, they need fear little difficulty 
in falling in love with the right and fit one, 
whenever he or she shall appear. Also, that there 
are as good fish in the sea as ever were caught, 
and that the man or woman who goes down to the 
grave single for lack of at least four or five oppor- 
tunities to marry is as rare as the proverbial hen's 
teeth. 

This high and noble standard of choice is even 
more obligatory upon us to-day than ever before, 
for the reason that we now know that mental and 
moral characters are inherited just as definitely 
and almost as surely as physical ones; that as 
the parents and grandparents are so will the chil- 
dren and grandchildren be. It therefore becomes 
our deepest and most binding biological duty to 
give to our children the best and the cleanest 
and the bravest inheritance that we can possibly 
secure for them; indeed we have no right to bring 
children into the world with any other. 

Nature after millions of years of experiments 
has determined that the best form of union, re- 
sulting in the birth and upbringing of the highest and 
fittest type of children, is the union between one 



WORSHIP OF THE RACE STREAM 247 

man and one woman for life, or at least for the whole 
long period of infancy and training, which, starting 
at the maturity of the parents, means practically 
the same thing. It must not for a moment be 
imagined that monogamic marriage is a thing of 
purely human device, let alone of legal, ecclesiastic 
or social invention. It was established by ex* 
periment and had proved its superiority in the 
animals millions of years before man appeared 
upon the scene. 

Not only is it a sin against nature and treason 
to our best instincts to mate for considerations 
of money or rank or social position, but even more 
so, of course, to exercise this wondrous power 
for any other purpose than that for which it orig- 
inally grew up — the continuance of the race 
stream. Nowhere else in the world does nature 
preach a clearer, more unmistakable message of 
clean living, of high thinking, of noble self-control. 
Control, as over all our other natural instincts and im- 
pulses, not because self-denial is a virtue in itself 
— far from it — but control in order to enable us 
to fulfil the impulse in the highest, most efficient, 
most perfect manner, which is also in the long 
run far the happiest, as well as purest. Faith- 
lessness to this standard brings invariably with 
it its own punishment, and always has done so 
through all the pages of human history. Racial 
morality, like all other true morality, is inherent 



248 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and self-existent, and needs no conventions of 
society or laws of man to enforce it. 

If any other warning were needed, nature has 
placed on either side of the path of rectitude, like 
the angels with flaming swords at the gate of the 
Garden of Eden, two of the most merciless, the 
most destructive and disgraceful of diseases. But 
their warning is only for the dullest and basest 
ears and the most clouded eyes; and the depiction 
of their dangers is as little needed by high-minded, 
clean-living, race-worshipping youths and maidens 
as the terrors and penalties of the criminal code are 
for the majority of mankind. 



CHAPTER XII 

RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 

EVERYTHING in this world is comparative 
— nothing absolute. The most important 
question about a condition is not so much 
is it good or bad, injurious or beneficent in itself, 
but is it better or worse than the state which pre- 
ceded it? And the second is like unto it, does it 
tend to make the future conditions better or worse 
than the present? In other words, it is not so 
much where we stand, as whether we are on an up- 
grade or down. This is peculiarly true of that much- 
vexed problem popularly known as race suicide. 
The mere coining of the name was a real public 
service. It set forth so clearly and vividly the possi- 
ble dangers v/hich might result from the prevalent 
course, or rather drift, in respect to the first and 
greatest commandment given in Holy Writ: "Be 
fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth." 
Clearly any policy or lack of it which diminishes the 
reproduction of the more desirable elements in a 
race or community, and leaves the lion's share of 
the growth in population to be contributed by the 
less desirable elements, is fraught with danger to 

249 



250 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

the future of the race. It was also of great value in 
emphasizing and publicly asserting the great moral 
law, founded upon the broadest and most ancient, 
not merely of religious but of biologic bases, that 
our first and greatest duty is not to ourselves but to 
the race. The race has the first mortgage upon us 
and our powers, and has had ever since we lay in 
the ooze of the tide flats and vibrated to the pulses 
of the sea. 

To-day, Jew and Gentile, Christian and Agnostic, 
Philosopher and Scientist, all unite in holding that 
the highest of all laws, before which all others should 
bend in consideration, is the welfare of the nation, 
the future of the race. Brought before the bar of 
this tribunal, it would appear as though our modern 
attitude toward race fruitfulness was deserving of 
severe condemnation, and of little else. And in part 
there can be no question that it is. That a consid- 
erable and increasing element of our population is 
becoming unwilling to rear children cannot be 
seriously denied and, in so far as this unwillingness 
is due to a selfish shirking of the expense, labour and 
responsibility involved, as expressed in the familiar 
phrases, " Don't want to be bothered with children," 
"Children interfere with your having a good time," 
it should be visited with the severest reprobation. 
Any man or woman who solely, or even chiefly, 
upon such grounds, refuses the duties of parentage 
is a traitor to the race and a coward and a skulker 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 251 

in the battle of life, and should be branded and 
despised accordingly. 

But while this motive unfortunately exists and 
assumes a most unpleasant conspicuousness in all 
public discussions of this question, and is avowed 
with distressingly cynical frankness in most private 
ones, it is to be doubted whether it is really respon- 
sible for more than a very small percentage of the 
tendency which it is alleged to explain. Any 
family physician can tell you of scores of young 
married couples who have frankly avowed this 
attitude, but the vast majority of them became 
ashamed of it later. Many times when it was per- 
haps too late they would have given anything to be 
able to undo the results of their selfish and short- 
sighted folly. It may be pointed out, in passing, 
that the crime of such offenders against the higher 
racial morality is self-punishing. It prevents the 
continuation of the breed of this stamp of individuals, 
which is a blessing rather than a curse to the com- 
munity. 

As Burke long ago pointed out, "It is impossible 
to frame an indictment against an entire people," 
least of all on such a low and discreditable a ground 
as this; and we must look further for the real forces 
which chiefly underlie the tendency. In my judg- 
ment there can be little serious question that at 
least two thirds of the modern unwillingness to 
bear children is based upon considerations affecting 



252 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

the welfare of the child, rather than that of the 
parents. It is of course an open question whether 
much of this feeling is not mistaken and from a 
rational point of view another form of selfishness; 
but it is a perfectly legitimate and honourable motive 
and the question it raises one which may be frankly 
and freely discussed upon its merits without any 
imputation of discredit, or making us despair of the 
future of the race. In fact, the only difference be- 
tween the good old times of large families and the 
present era of smaller ones is that nowadays we 
face the problem squarely, while formerly it was 
dodged and left to settle itself. 

There are few problems which are surrounded 
by a thicker fog of misconceptions. The first and 
most ludicrous of these is the idea that the problem 
is a new one. It dates back to times long before 
the dawn of history. Instead of being a mark of 
the decadence due to civilization, it was not until 
civilization was well advanced that infanticide was 
ever regarded as a crime at all. Practically all 
savage, most barbarous, and many civilized tribes, 
such for instance as the much-boasted Spartans, 
habitually and publicly abandoned or destroyed 
superfluous infants without the slightest compunc- 
tion and as a matter of routine. The life of the 
child absolutely belonged to the father, and he could 
dispose of it as he would, not only without hindrance, 
but without criticism. Even so well developed a 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 253 

code as the early Roman Law formally recognized 
this power of the father over his children until they 
had passed their majority. In many tribes, female 
infants were habitually destroyed unless concealed 
by their mothers, because they were regarded as 
useless incumbrances in a community of warriors. 
The practice even developed into the dignity of a 
ceremonial or religious rite, and conferred merit 
and credit upon those who followed it. Instead of 
infanticide in every imaginable form being a modern 
crime, it is one of the oldest iniquities in the world. 
In fact for thousands upon thousands of years it 
was considered a virtue. While as to methods of 
preventing or terminating conception, many a tribe 
of Australian black fellows, running naked and killing 
snakes with their teeth, could give startling pointers 
to our most expert abortionists of the twentieth 
century. In short, one of the best and most foun- 
dational characterizations that can be given of the 
three great stages of civilization is that savage means 
with stationary or diminishing numbers, barbarous 
with slowly increasing, and civilized with rapidly 
increasing population. Whatever criminal charges 
may be urged against civilization it certainly has 
not resulted in diminishing the fertility and rate of 
increase of the race. Over against all the jere- 
miads and wailings about decadence, diminishing 
fertility, declining birth rates, race suicide and the 
like, the cold, massive, indigestible fact remains, 



254 "WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

solid as a granite obelisk, that the rate of increase of 
any known civilized community is greater than that 
of any known savage or barbarous one; and that 
with the single exception of France, those nations 
that stand highest in the scale of civilization are 
increasing their population at the most rapid rate. 
The population of England for instance has increased 
in the past fifty years more than ioo per cent. ; that 
of Germany nearly as much, while our own land, 
which is held up, and probably justly, as the worst 
offender of all in the matter of intentional race 
suicide has grown in the last thirty years from fifty 
millions to ninety millions, only twelve millions of 
which was due to immigration. So far as the tes- 
timony of statistics goes, race suicide, in the sense 
of race extermination is as remote as the millenium, 
and as arrant a bugaboo as the Jabberwock. 

Of course it will be instantly objected there are 
scores of other factors besides the mere number of 
children born per family, which play a part in this 
rapid increase of civilized communities. The aboli- 
tion of famines, for instance, by the increasing 
abundance of food supply and improvements in 
transportation, the victories over and harnessing to 
human use of the great world forces — wind, steam, 
water and electricity; the vastly increasing knowledge 
of the nature and causation of disease, enabling us to 
stamp out epidemics and lower the death rates. 
All these have to be taken into consideration. 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 255 

Precisely; but the point is that all these strides of 
progress are a product of precisely the same intelli- 
gence which leads the race seriously to consider the 
problem — to bear or not to bear children. We 
have intelligently and voluntarily diminished the 
size of our families in order that we may be able to 
feed, to educate, to protect better and more abun- 
dantly, those children that are born. And Wis- 
dom is abundantly justified of both her children. 
Within reasonable limits and indeed so far as the 
progress has ever gone hitherto, the diminished size 
of the family has been more than compensated for 
by the increased vigour, health and efficiency of 
the children reared, so that the net result has 
been to lessen the waste of life and to increase the 
growth of population instead of diminishing it. A 
high birth rate is anything but a sign of high racial 
vigour or national progress. Indeed, by apparent 
paradox, it is a commonplace of vital statistics that 
a high birth rate, almost invariably means a high 
death rate and particularly a huge infant mortality. 
This is true not merely of different nations and of 
races in different regions and climates, but it is 
also true of superior and inferior races living side 
by side and of the different classes in the same 
nation. Our Negro and Indian populations in this 
country, for instance, have a higher birth rate 
than that of the surrounding white population, 
but such an enormously increased death rate and 



256 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

infant mortality that it more than neutralizes this, 
so that the Negro is increasing more slowly than the 
white man, if indeed he be not at a standstill; 
while the Indian is steadily declining in numbers. 
The birth rate of our slums population is high, 
but their death rate rises in proportion, so that the 
net increase is only slightly greater than that of the 
more fortunate classes of our population. I am un- 
able to find any adequate basis whatever for the 
dread that there is any danger of the more intelligent, 
more efficient and more desirable elements of the 
population being physically swamped by the high 
birth rate of the weaker and less desirable classes. 
If such an event should occur, it would be absolutely 
at variance with all the experience of the past and 
with the whole tendency of evolution. To put it 
brutally and frankly, from a racial point of view, the 
question is not of limiting or not limiting the number 
of children, but of how it shall be limited. Our choice 
practically and racially lies between preventing their 
coming into existence or weeding them out by star- 
vation, by disease and neglect after they have been 
born. Which is the more humane method? 

The second great misconception which confuses 
most discussions of this problem is that this modern 
tendency to limit the size of families is a mark of 
moral degeneracy, of lack of patriotism, of unwill- 
ingness to sacrifice one's own comfort for the good of 
the race. We are told from many a pulpit that the 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 257 

modern woman is becoming forgetful of her chief 
and highest duty, to rear children in the fear of the 
Lord: or that, if she recognizes this duty, she is 
rebellious against it. And we are pointed admiringly 
and regretfully to the good old days of two hundred, 
one hundred, even fifty years ago when mothers 
saw their duty to Church and State and meekly 
performed it in the shape of families -of eight, 
twelve, and fifteen children. 

There are only two defects in this beautiful dream 
of the days of old when "none were for the party, 
and all for the State; and the rich man helped the 
poor and the poor man loved the great." The 
first is that neither the fathers nor the mothers of 
these huge families had any particular intention, 
or indeed idea of sacrificing themselves for the race, 
or doing their duty by the community; they were 
simply following their instincts and taking the 
consequences more or less patiently — and stupidly. 
The second is that, with the exception of the 
small wealthy class, these large families, if valued 
at all, were valued chiefly as a source of income 
to their parents from the earnings or work of 
the children during their time of dependence. We 
rightly denounce the modern sweat shop and the 
factory or mine crowded with child-workers, but 
let us remember that a larger percentage of the 
children of these huge families among the working 
and farming classes a hundred years ago were 



258 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

underfed, overworked, beaten and ill-treated, stu ted 
physically, and deformed morally, than of the chil- 
dren of any civilized community to-day, even in 
factory towns. We may mourn over the decadence 
of family discipline and bewail the waning sanctity 
of the marriage tie, but the conditions which pre- 
vailed in many and many a model family of the large 
and hard-working type, common a century ago, were 
crueller and more intolerable in their injustice than 
eight tenths of what is revealed in our divorce 
courts to-day. 

As a matter of fact, scarcely the slightest trace of 
intelligence or intention, or of deliberate forethought, 
entered into the production of these ideal, big, old- 
fashioned families, except where the parents ex- 
pected to profit by the labour or wages of their 
offspring. How many of them, for instance, would 
have come into existence if the mother had been 
for a moment consulted about the matter? How 
many of the surplus children, whose lives must 
inevitably be wasted in the attempt to rear ten 
children upon means adequate for four, would vote 
for the continuance of such a plan if they could 
be consulted? The parents to-day who are the 
strongest advocates of small families are those 
who were the members of large ones themselves. 
As a friend of mine, humorously but practically 
expressed it: "There were ten of us, and when 
father brought home candy, we just got a lick 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 259 

apiece: I am going to see that my children get a 
whole stick each!" 

The only difference between the selfish parents 
of to-day and the self-sacrificing, devoted ones of a 
century ago is that the former think about the 
problem while the latter didn't. 

The third great misconception which befogs this 
question is that such tendency toward race suicide 
which exists is chiefly the fault of the woman in 
the case. This is little better than the belated 
echo from the Garden of Eden: "It was the woman 
that thou gavest me!" The prospective male 
parent of to-day is just as keenly alive as his mate 
to the burdens and handicaps imposed upon him 
by an unnecessary profusion of offspring and, 
what is more important and fundamental, to the 
serious injustice committed against the child brought 
into the keen, remorseless struggle for existence 
without the bestof rearing, training and equipment. 
It is true that the heavier physical burden and 
penalty of child-bearing and child-rearing falls 
upon the mother, but this is more than offset by 
the depth and power of her maternal instincts. 

Women may shrink from and evade and postpone 
even indefinitely the risks and responsibilities of 
motherhood but the woman who would deliberately 
and contentedly face the prospect of going through 
life without ever having a chick or a child of her own 
is distinctly a rata avis. And when you get down 



260 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

to the real feelings and the bottommost thought of 
even the most blase man of the world, or the most 
inveterate old bachelor of clubdom, you will stumble 
upon a primal longing for a child of his own to 
carry his name and keep up the traditions of the 
family, or a sense of secret bitterness and disap- 
pointment if this has been denied him. 

The race-continuing instinct is the deepest and 
most primitive in our nature, and the more we 
strive to smother or defy it the more surely it will 
wreak its vengeance upon us. A man or woman 
without children or desire for any is as rare and 
contemptible as a man without a country. The 
man who prefers his club and the woman who pre- 
fers her lap-dog to children exist, but they have 
violated the highest law of racial morality and the 
deepest instinct of their being, and they pay the 
penalty in disease, debauchery and disgrace, and 
the loathing contempt of all right-minded people ■ — 
a contempt so deep that it finds difficulty in ex- 
pressing itself in words. Our consolation, from a 
racial point of view, is that in their case the law of 
the elimination of the unfit is producing one of its 
most striking demonstrations and most useful results. 

But there are many who deny themselves ab- 
solutely privileges of fatherhood and motherhood 
upon grounds which are not only selfish or in any 
way discreditable, but of the highest and most 
unselfish. I refer to that small but rapidly in- 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 261 

creasing class who refuse to bear children because 
they believe themselves, rightly or wrongly, likely 
to transmit physical or mental defects. This at- 
titude is one of the highest triumphs of biologic 
morality and racial ethics, and is entitled not merely 
to our profoundest respect and warmest encour- 
agement, but to our deepest sympathy. Next after 
the deliberate laying down of his own life for his 
country it is the highest and hardest sacrifice of 
which any human being is capable. Each instance 
of this sort should of course be most carefully and 
thoroughly studied by at least four or five medical 
and biological experts so as to establish most firmly 
and unquestionably the existence of such a defect 
in the blood of the individual and the probability 
of its transmission to offspring. Not only so, but the 
precise percentage of such offspring which are likely 
to inherit this defect should be worked out as nearly 
as possible. For it must be remembered that the 
mere ability to come to such, a decision as this in- 
dicates the attainment of a high plane and the pos- 
session of both mental and moral qualities which it 
is exceedingly desirable to have transmitted to the 
future generation, if the physical handicap be not 
too great. 

It must also be remembered that, according 
to the best evidence at our disposal so far, defects 
of all sorts, both physical and bodily, are, as 
their name implies, negative, not positive, reces- 



262 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

sives, not dominants in the Mendelian scheme of 
heredity, and that the risks of their reappearing 
in future generations are much smaller than we at 
one time supposed. But, putting it roughly, the 
chances are at least five to one that they will be 
dominated or neutralized by the vigorous, healthy 
characters in the ancestry, especially if the other 
parent happens to be born both sound and de- 
scended from healthy stock. To put it very roughly : 
Bad qualities tend to breed out — good ones to 
persist; otherwise evolution would be a progress 
downward instead of upward. The chance of 
three healthy, desirable children to one possible 
defective, is certainly a legitimate risk to take, 
from both the individual and racial point of view. 
The one danger of this race conscience, this bio- 
logical scruple, lies in the fact that it will often be 
active in the most desirable elements of the com- 
munity — those who ought on racial grounds in 
every way to reproduce their kind — while it is 
entirely absent in those who ought most to be con- 
scious of it — the real defective, the roue, the 
drunkard and the criminal. The remedy for this 
is not to diminish the realm of this scruple but to 
increase it, to broaden the field of its operation 
until it includes not merely the defective parent, 
but the other one, usually the mother. It should be 
regarded as an outrage against herself, and a crime 
against the State for any mother to bear children 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 263 

to a father whom she knows to be either mentally 
or morally unfit to be a father. This should not 
only be publicly avowed by the community, but 
should be enrolled among the laws of the State 
and the precepts of the Church. The former is 
slowly recognizing this, as our increasing roll of 
divorces testifies; the latter is, as usual, fighting it 
tooth and nail. The moment that any woman 
discovers that she is married to a drunkard, a 
libertine, a brute or a criminal, that moment she 
ought to be set free from him, not merely for her 
own sake and for that of the children already born, 
but still more for the sake of those who never ought 
to be born. When this has once been accomplished, 
we may begin to look for a real and effective elim- 
ination of the unfit, a diminishing of crime and 
pauperism and a new standard of purity in the 
marriage relation which some people may find it 
difficult to live up to. We talk of the menace of 
the criminal class — biologically considered, there 
scarcely is a criminal class. The three vengeful furies 
of race purification — disease, drink and dirt — do 
their deadly work upon the criminal so effectively, 
saddle him with such a low birth rate and enor- 
mous death rate, that he would die out within 
three generations if left to himself. But his ranks 
are recruited so steadily year after year by the 
failures, the misfits, the black sheep of the classes 
above him, a large percentage of whom are children 



264 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

born by unwilling mothers to more or less respect- 
able, drunken, reprobate, or brutal husbands, from 
whom they have vainly struggled to get free. 

To sum up: I believe that the evidence shows 
that race suicide, so far as it has yet gone, has 
proved an almost unmixed blessing instead of a 
curse; that the race can never again return to the 
method of blind and wholesale reproduction without 
thought of the future or calculation of the ultimate 
result. On the other hand, the tendency to limit 
the number of children within reasonable limits is 
likely to broaden and spread, and will also be ration- 
alized and purified. No class or group in the 
community which believes itself worthy to exist 
can of course consider any proposal to limit the off- 
spring of a marriage to less than three, or such num- 
ber as may be necessary to secure the survival of that 
quota of adult age, so that the second generation 
may be at least a trifle more numerous than the first. 
Otherwise it would of course either become extinct 
or be practically overwhelmed by the rest of the 
community. 

Biologic morality, while deprecating the pro- 
duction of children who are either likely to be 
born unfit or become so from lack of proper sup- 
port and adequate training, glorifies and exalts, 
as both the highest racial duty and the most precious 
individual privilege, the production of children by 
those who are both personally fit to bear and finan- 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 265 

cially competent to rear children who will be of 
value to the State. There is no achievement better 
worth living for, no more valuable legacy that can 
be left to the future, or more enduring claim to 
honourable remembrance than a family of well- 
born, well-reared children. And this feeling is 
steadily spreading among the great intelligent upper 
stratum of the middle class, the real aristocracy of 
any country. The pendulum has already started 
on its return swing and in the reasonably and 
honestly successful classes of the nation, fair-sized 
families are beginning to be looked upon as desirable 
luxuries, quite as well worth spending money upon 
as automobiles or fine horses or balls and dinners. 
We are beginning to take a pride in breeding pedi- 
greed human stock instead of confining ourselves 
to horses and dogs and poultry. Children are 
coming to be as desirable adornments as they were 
in the days of the Roman matron. At the same 
time, there is a growing tendency to encourage and 
promote in every possible way the marriage at a 
reasonably early age of young people who are par- 
ticularly desirable as future ancestors, to use a 
Hibernicism. Some day, possibly, we may become 
sufficiently intelligent to endow this sort of matri- 
mony with State funds. 

The general progress of modern civilization has 
markedly diminished infant mortality, together with 
all other death rates. How far have the well-meant 



266 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

experiments of philanthropy assisted in this and 
how far have they hindered? One of its first and 
most natural attempts, the institutional treatment 
of children, has been weighed and now almost 
unanimously found wanting. Babies can be raised 
cheaply by wholesale, but they are apt to be a cheap 
machine-made product, without individuality or initi- 
ative. No place like home for growing live children in, 
and a baby's best friend is its mother, or failing her, 
its aunt, or older sister. The community will save 
money by paying them to take care of it instead of 
endowing foundling hospitals and orphan asylums. 

Another practice of doubtful value has been that 
of preaching to the poor to be content with their 
wages and with that station to which it has pleased 
Providence to call them, instead of encouraging 
them to fight for higher wages and a fairer share 
of the products of their toil. Life, growth and 
progress are all wasteful instead of economical. 
The economical nations of the world are the stag- 
nant ones. The chief cause of infant mortality is 
poverty; the second and third its cousins, ignorance 
and dirt. The only radical cure for poverty is 
higher wages. Philanthropy has not addressed itself 
positively yet to the practical side of the problem, 
raising wages and shortening hours; the poor have 
been left to fight that out alone. Poverty is not a 
permanent nor a necessary state, still less a desirable 
one, or a means of grace. It is an accident — a 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 267 

disease and a preventable disease at that. Every- 
thing that we do on the positive side toward pre- 
venting poverty will prevent disease, infant mor- 
tality, dependency, pauperism and crime. From 
20 to 40 per cent, of the large infant mortality of 
English factory mothers is attributed to immaturity 
and prematurity, which means underfeeding, over- 
work, or over-breeding of the mothers. 

Of even more doubtful value is the plan of teach- 
ing the poor to use cheap foods, especially for their 
children, to make the little that they have to go 
a long way. The little is made to go a long way 
chiefly by diluting it with water, as in soups in soup 
kitchens, or with starch and indigestible vegetable 
fibre and husk, as in cornmeal, oatmeal, bran bread, 
mushes, beans and coarse vegetables. We would not 
dream of living on these things ourselves, they are 
nearly all either grossly defective in proteins, like 
cornmeal, potatoes, and rice, or loaded with irritating 
and indigestible elements, like beans and peas and 
oatmeal and nuts, or consist chiefly of salts, water 
and vegetable fibre about as digestible as cocoanut 
matting, like the green vegetables and the salads. 
A cheap food, eight times out of ten, is cheap be- 
cause it is deficient in nutritive value, or lacks one 
or more important elements, or is beginning to mould 
or decay. Children must have expensive food, an 
abundance of proteins, sugars and fats, if they are to 
grow up into men and women worth while. To preach 



268 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

economy in feeding infants, or their mothers while 
nursing them, is to preach a high death rate and stunt- 
ed survivors, ready to become paupers and criminals. 

Another experiment of doubtful value is that of 
encouraging mothers to go on working up to and 
directly after child-birth and neglect the nursing 
of their own children. Anything that helps to make 
this easier, such as creches and day nurseries es- 
pecially such as receive infants at ten days old, 
ought to balance very carefully the good they may 
do against the harm they certainly do. The child 
is the ward of the State, just as much before he be- 
comes an orphan as afterward. One of the great 
German municipalities some years ago boldly recog- 
nized this fact in regard to illegitimate children. 
They were placed in families and taken care of by 
the city at an early age, with the ironic result that 
their mortality rate dropped to half that of the 
legitimate children! Why can't the non-bastards 
of the exploited classes have a little of that same 
fostering care? The best and most paying job that 
the community can set any mother at is that of 
raising her own child to the highest pitch of efficiency 
and intelligence. Some day we'll have sense enough 
to pay her to do it and feed herself well in the pro- 
cess, though the ultimate and permanent solution 
will be to give higher wages to the father. 

It is to be doubted whether the habit in philan- 
thropic circles of encouraging mothers of the working 



RELUCTANT PARENTAGE 269 

class to bear large families, or offering prizes or ex- 
emptions from taxes for all children above a certain 
number, or discouraging any deliberate attempt to 
limit the number of children is either a helpful or an 
intelligent one. A high birth rate practically always 
means a high death rate and a huge infant mor- 
tality. The production of a larger number of 
children than can be adequately fed and properly 
trained is one of the most serious complications 
of the problem and obstacles to social progress. The 
quality of children reared is vastly more important 
than the quantity. A large amount of human raw 
material is required for purposes of selection, but 
some of that selection had better be made before 
birth instead of after. Man and his intelligence are 
a part of nature, and we are steadily substituting 
an intelligent consideration of the problem to bear 
or not to bear children, for the old, stupid, cruel, 
wasteful method of producing as many children as 
the Fates permitted, and leaving Nature to weed out 
the less fit by disease, starvation, and cut-throat 
competition. Infanticide and abortion are ruinous 
physically as well as criminal morally, but are they 
as cruel to the unfortunate infants concerned? 
An intelligent selection of those individuals who shall 
or who shall not bear children, a thoughtful deter- 
mination not to bring into the world more children 
than we are reasonably able to raise and equip 
adequately, mark the path of future progress. 



CHAPTER XIII 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 



UPON most points our conceit is robust and 
colossal. We are the people, and knowl- 
edge shall die with us. Word excavators 
inform us that the primitive meaning of that some- 
what vague but mouth-filling term which those of 
us of Germanic blood are so proud to apply to our- 
selves, "Teutonic," is simply the people. But 
we are delightfully inconsistent, in our vices as well 
as our virtues, and there is one point at which our 
comfortable armour of conceit gapes widely and 
crumbles before the lightest spear, and that is the 
breeding of the rising generation and the training 
of our young. That alone of all our modern ways 
of doing things we humbly admit, nay, make haste 
to loudly deplore, is far inferior to the practice of 
our mothers and fathers, and still more so to that 
of our grandfathers and grandmothers. 

It is not necessary that any one should reproach 
us with our shortcomings in this regard. We lift up 
our voices of our own accord and loudly bewail the 
disappearance of the home, the weakening of family 
ties, the selfishness of parents, and the irreverence 

270 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 271 

of the young. We are quite sure that the modern 
father cares very much more for his business, his 
club, and his politics than his parental duties, and 
that the modern mother is much more deeply ab- 
sorbed in the culture of her mind, in the expensive 
adornment of her person and in the pursuit of social 
prestige, than she is in the care of her children and 
house. 

The reasons for this gratuitous poor opinion of 
ourselves and our generation are not far to seek. 
Much of it is the natural and inevitable result of 
the dreadful contrast between the real and the ideal, 
our own childhoods as we so clearly remember them, 
and the childhoods of our fathers and mothers, as 
they have so often described them to us, ideally 
happy and wholesome and perfect. Our parents 
were so supernaturally wise and devoted and we 
ourselves so impossibly good and obedient, that it 
is quite out of the question to expect to see such 
another little heaven below, in the course of our 
existence upon this mundane sphere. And, of 
course, we don't, for the simple but sufficient 
reason that two thirds of what we are pleased to 
term " recollections " of our early childhood are 
as pure moonshine and fairy tale as anything be- 
tween the covers of the Green Fairy Book, or even 
in the pages of Sir John Mandeville, or Baron 
Munchausen. The stories that we relate at re- 
unions, or in old home weeks, or pour into the eager 



272 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

ears of our innocent offspring, are not so much 
romancings, as they are, in the language of Mr. 
Gilbert, " attempts to lend an air of artistic veri- 
similitude and interest to an otherwise bald and 
unconvincing narrative." The skeleton of them, 
so to speak, is approximately true, but when we 
clothe them with flesh and blood, and the glow and 
colour of life, the resulting legend is much more 
nearly a rendition of what should have happened 
to us, or what we would like to think did happen to 
us, than an actual transcription of the cold and colour- 
less facts. After we have told them half a dozen 
times, with successive modifications needed to pro- 
duce the required impressive effect, we actually come 
to believe them ourselves, and, as all the other boys 
and girls of long ago stand by us, both from a spirit 
of true comradeship and to insure our backing for 
their flights of retrospective imagination, our child- 
hood memories become a thing of rosy vapours 
and purple lights, and the heights that we could 
jump, and the weights we could lift, the number and 
size of the boys we licked, and the beauty and wit 
of our little sweethearts of long ago, something to 
marvel at and remember with delight. 

Naturally, nothing like that ever happens nowa- 
days in the cold and garish light of day, only in the 
light that never was on sea or land could such things 
have been seen. Another reason, and one which 
comes closely home, is that we have lost the blessed 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 273 

and happy faith of childhood. We are perfectly 
convinced, and rightly, that our mother was the 
best woman in the world, and that our father was 
wisdom and omniscience itself, and could lick any 
other man in town. Do we for a moment believe 
this, can we, even if we try, of the fathers and 
mothers of our own day and generation whom we see 
about us in the shop and on the streets? They're 
nothing but overgrown children who, like ourselves, 
have in some absurd and utterly illogical manner, 
taken it into their heads to have other children of 
their own. The only difference that we can see 
between the two is in their size and age. Are 
they anything like "Father" or "Mother?" Perish 
the thought! We are in something the same at- 
titude as the big, overgrown, bashful booby of a 
farmer's boy who was afraid even to speak to a 
girl, and whose father one day finally lost patience 
and scolded him roundly for not looking about and 
finding some girl to marry. "Why," he said, "at 
your age I had been married three years and had a 
house and farm of my own." "Well, but, dad," 
complained the boy, "that ain't the same thing 
at all. You only had to marry mother, while I've 
got to go hunt up some strange girl and ask 
her to marry me!" The preposterous fathers and 
mothers of our own day and generation are, and will 
ever remain to us, simply strange girls or alto- 
gether too familiar boys, playing at being grown up 



274 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and keeping house. Fathers and mothers aren't 
what they used to be when we were young, nor chil- 
dren either. 

As a matter of fact we were as ordinary, trifling, 
lazy, impudent little "varmints" as the sun ever 
shone on, or ever will. But could you make any 
of us believe it now? 

' This is the chief, I had almost said the sole, ground 
for those jeremiades about the inefficiency and the 
selfishness of the modern mother, and the indifference 
and lack of sense of responsibility of the twentieth 
century father which we hear on every hand. When- 
ever we try to make the comparison between the 
new family life and the old, "fond memory brings 
the light of other days around us," and we see the 
past as a bright rainbow against the black thunder- 
cloud of the present and of the future. Yet I am 
convinced that our forebodings are but such stuff 
as dreams are made of, and that there never was a 
time when motherhood was more devoted and 
unselfish, and fatherhood more anxious to give and 
sacrifice everything to make the rising generation 
happy and successful as now, and there certainly 
never was a time when they were one half so in- 
telligent or one quarter so well equipped for their 
task. 

The charges that are most commonly brought 
against the modern mother in general, and the 
American mother in particular as the most flagrant 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 275 

example of that alleged traitor to her family and her 
race, the New Woman, are: First, that she is 
physically incompetent for the tasks and strains 
of maternity; second, that she is selfish in that she 
prefers her own comfort and good looks and success 
in life to either the number or the health of her 
children; third, that she has become so ambitious 
for independence and for public recognition that 
she is neglecting the duties of her home. Fourth, 
that her management of her children is remarkably 
injudicious, that she has no idea of discipline and 
they are spoiled and pampered and allowed to 
grow up without any respect for their elders; fiftlh 
that, partly by the weakness of her own nerves arid 
partly by the unnatural and unwholesome con- 
ditions of food, housing, dress and social habits, 
she permits her children to grow up under, she is 
impairing the stamina of the race and undermining 
its future. 

Not one of these charges will stand the light of 
inquiry, and most of them go up in smoke under the 
first drop of the acid test of investigation and com- 
parison. To take the gravest and most fundamen- 
tal charge first: Is the American mother of to-day 
physically unfitted for her vital and noble task, 
the bearing and rearing of children? Nothing could 
be more disastrous than her failure in this regard, 
and, from a biologic point of view, no triumph or 
achievement of man, however brilliant or spec- 



276 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

tacular, can compare in dignity, in nobleness, and 
in value to the race with the bearing of children. 
The home is the real centre of the world, round 
which all its activities, its pomp, and pageantry 
revolve. For its defence, armies march forth to bat- 
tle; for its support, smithies ring, and looms whirr, 
and great industries grow up, and trade empires 
are buih. For its protection and health, courts are 
established, and senates meet, and churches raise 
their spires toward heaven. The chief duty of man, 
in the biological catechism, is to grow in wisdom and 
vigour, in honour, in kindness and happiness up to 
thirty years of age, after that to enable his children 
so to grow. This is his only excuse for remaining 
longer on the planet after they appear. 

The real and supreme test of any civilization, is 
the quality of the men and women it produces, the 
character of the children that it breeds. The old 
German proverb goes to the heart of the matter: 
"The best of everything is none too good for the 
child." If the American mother is indeed under- 
mining her physique and her reproductive vigour, 
she is guilty of high treason against her race and 
against the community. What is the testimony in 
support of this grave charge? For the most part, 
vehement asseverations full of sound and fury signi- 
fying nothing. Occasionally the picking out of a 
few isolated instances, from which it is argued that 
the process is universal. The more carefully they 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 277 

are examined, the more completely do these alle- 
gations and alleged exhibits resolve themselves into 
varying forms of the ancient delusion that the golden 
days were the good old times, when all the men were 
brave and patriotic and honest, and all the women 
virtuous and devoted, and that there were giants 
in those days before whom the creatures of these 
degenerate times are little better than pigmies. 

When we come to actual data and measurements, 
and get down to the hard pan of actual fact, there 
is a surprising agreement pointing in exactly the 
opposite direction. If the American woman of to- 
day be degenerate, neurasthenic, lacking in stamina 
and constitution, one would certainly expect her to 
show it in a diminishing stature, a lessened chest ex- 
pansion, a lower weight, a higher death rate, and in 
greater liability to disease. Upon all of these points, 
nine tenths of the statistics available, point in exactly 
the opposite direction. Never in the history of the 
human race has there been such a marked improve- 
ment in height, weight, chest girth, longevity, and 
morbidity as in the last fifty to seventy-five years, 
and this improvement has been most rapid and 
striking in the last twenty-five years, just the very 
period in which this alleged degeneracy has been 
most rampant. Accurate and reasonably reliable 
statistics in regard to health and vital conditions 
have been available for about only forty years, but 
in that time the general death rate has decreased 



278 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

nearly forty per cent., the average length of life has 
increased thirtyper cent., the average height of adults 
has increased* nearly an inch, and the average weight 
between ten and twelve pounds. These statements 
are based upon Board of Health statistics and upon 
measurements running up into the thousands, and, 
in some cases, hundreds of thousands, made upon 
soldiers, college students — the average height, for 
instance, of the Harvard students since 1861 has 
increased nearly an inch, and the chest girth and 
weight in proportion — upon factory operatives, 
and upon school-children. The objection may, of 
course, be raised that as, in the nature of the case, 
most of these measurements have been taken upon 
men, can we be sure that the same process is 
taking place in women? Fortunately this doubt 
can be laid at once, for vital statistics of course 
include impartially both men and women, and at 
almost every age, with the single exception of one 
decennium in the period of child-bearing in women, 
the lowering of the morbidity (percentage of illness), 
has been greater in women than in men, the increase 
of longevity has been nearly two years more, and the 
decrease in the death rate has been greater. In the 
matter of height, weight, and chest girth, such smaller 
numbers of measurements of women as has been 
made show also in the same direction. Girls in 
schools, for instance, have not only made a greater 
increase and improvement in height and weight than 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 279 

boys but have actually at certain ages absolutely 
outstripped them, and are for a time the physical 
superiors of boys of their own age, though, of course, 
usually inferior in muscular vigour. Incidentally it 
may be remarked that most of even this inferior 
muscular difference in girls is due to our antiquated 
and senseless training in the matter of dress, devel- 
opment and ladylike behaviour, and the avoidance 
of tomboyism. Not infrequently nowadays, where 
children are allowed to grow up unspoiled and 
natural or what is usually termed " thoroughly 
spoiled," a girl will become the head of the gang or 
the bully of the school. 

In short, there never was a time in the recorded 
history of the world when women were as well 
abreast of men physically as they are to-day. What 
they lack in mere muscular vigour and pugnacious 
achievement they fully make up in vegetative vitality 
and powers of passive endurance and resistance. 
Women, in spite of the outcry which their sensitive 
nerves often make in advance, bear real pain and pro- 
longed suffering more patiently and bravely than men 
do, and stand them better. They can maintain some 
sort of a physical equilibrium upon smaller amounts 
of food, and with less air and out-of-door exercise 
than men. They will stand for half a lifetime a 
monotonous drudgery of unending work in a tread- 
mill called home that would drive most men to drink 
or the insane asylum within five years. Contrary 



28o WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

to popular impression, they resist most diseases 
better than men do, not merely in proportion to 
their size and muscular strength, but absolutely 
and, oddly enough, this discrepancy is most striking 
in the acute infections, such as tuberculosis, pneu- 
monia, and typhoid, in all of which the male death 
rate is slightly, but distinctly, higher than the female. 
Between five and ten per cent, more men than women 
die of tuberculosis, for instance. Almost the only 
class in the community in which mortality and 
morbidity of women exceeds that of men, is among 
farmers' wives, and for reasons which are perfectly 
obvious to any one who has ever lived on a farm. 
Even here the greater death and disease rate shows 
only in those two ten-year periods when many 
farmers' wives are engaged in working themselves 
to death and bearing too many children at one and 
the same time. It used to be a common saying in 
the Middle West, thirty years ago, that most of a 
certain type of successful farmers were living with 
their second and third wives. Now, thank heaven, 
that type of woman has learned either to assert her 
rights to survive and share in the prosperity that 
she has built, or get a divorce, and then we lift up 
our hands in holy horror at the increasing lack of 
reverence for the holy sacrament of matrimony. 

It hardly needs an inspection of dry vital statistics 
and musty records to prove that the American woman 
is not deteriorating physically, but distinctly im- 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 281 

proving. All that is necessary is to keep our eyes 
about us. How often will you meet a mother whose 
grown, or even sixteen-year-old daughters are 
shorter than she is? When in any previous age 
could you pick out in any community, or in any 
assembly, such scores of tall, graceful, fresh-coloured, 
vigorous young Dianas and Bacchantes capable of 
taking their part and of making it interesting for 
the average man with the raquet, the golf club, 
the paddle, or in swimming, cross-country tramping, 
mountain climbing, and dancing all night long. It 
is a common saying that the tall girl has become 
fashionable, and therefore she has appeared in 
scores. This involves a high compliment to the 
magic power of woman in making herself anything 
that she chooses to be, and far from an undeserved 
one. Boast as we may of belonging to the Superior 
Sex, in our heart of hearts we know perfectly well 
that women can make not only herself but us about 
what she chooses. We have almost the solid and 
simple faith of the small boy, who, while gazing with 
open-eyed wonder and delight on the picture of an 
elephant standing on a wine glass, was pained by the 
suggestion of a skeptical elder brother that it was 
impossible for an elephant to do such a thing. 
Turning a reproachful gaze upon the scoffer, he 
solemnly declared: "There just hain't nuffin' that 
a effelunt can't do!" 

But apart from the exercise of such mysterious 



282 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and occult powers, there is not the slightest question 
that the enormous improvement — in food, in good 
ventilation and fresh air, in exercises and in play, and 
in rational amusements, and more healthful and 
sensible methods of life generally — which has taken 
place within the last thirty years is nowhere more 
clearly and delightfully shown than in the increas- 
ing vigour and intelligence and happiness and power 
of initiative of the girls and young women of to-day. 
Nor is this improvement confined simply to the 
tennis-playing and country-club supporting classes 
of society who are producing the athletic type of girl 
in such increasing numbers, but it is almost equally 
true of the great middle class and wage-earning eight 
tenths of the community, as is shown in the most 
unexpected but most convincing and prosaic fact, 
that the sizes of ready-made clothing, including 
shoes and gloves, are steadily increasing all over the 
United States, so much so that the numbers of 
twenty years ago are almost a size too small for girls 
of a corresponding age, or for adults, to-day. The 
more distinctly American the region, in the best 
sense, that of improved food, housing, and living 
conditions, and a more equable diffusion of resources 
and advances throughout the community, and the 
more striking is this change, as shown by the fact 
that the size of gloves and shirtwaists, for instance, 
which suit the Boston trade are too small in Chicago 
or Cleveland. Any one who will walk through the 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 283 

retail districts of one of our large cities, just after 
the closing hour, and note the flood of tall, well- 
grown, happy-faced young girls, with graceful 
carriage and fresh colour, that sweeps past him and 
can continue to believe that American womanhood 
is degenerating is a pessimist whose reason is closed 
to the evidence of his senses. 

But some one may object, does this necessarily 
prove that the American woman of to-day is as well 
or better fitted than before for her maternal duties ? 
Is it not possible that she may have increased, so 
to speak, selfishly in general physical and bodily 
vigour, but have lost ground in respect to her power 
of continuing the race stream unimpaired? From 
a biologic point of view it is hardly possible to 
conceive of such an anomalous form of develop- 
ment, but it is not necessary to argue the matter on 
a priori grounds, as, fortunately, statistics here are 
as definite and convincing as in regard to her general 
physical vigour. The American baby of to-day 
has, with the exception of certain congested areas, 
populated almost exclusively by recently arrived 
foreign-born immigrants, the lowest death rate, the 
lowest disease rate, and the highest average weight 
and length at one year of age of any baby in the 
world. The American school child of to-day is 
taller, heavier, and of greater chest girth than the 
children of any European nation, and this supe- 
riority is not the result merely of a sudden blossom- 



284 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

ing out in a better environment of higher wages, and 
greater opportunities for betterment, but is cumu- 
lative, as in our schools children of foreign-born 
parents are taller and heavier than the foreign-born 
children, the children of the second generation of 
American birth are slightly taller and heavier yet, 
while the list in physical superiority is headed by 
those children who have been for three or more 
generations American. 

The second charge against the American mother — 
that she prefers her own comfort and welfare to 
either the number or health of her children, in other 
words, she is becoming unwilling to assume the 
cares and responsibilities of motherhood — is more 
difficult to meet and decide upon. In support 
of it we have the unquestioned and apparently 
damning fact, that not only are the birth rate and 
the marriage rate steadily diminishing, but that 
the number of children born per family has under- 
gone a distinct and, apparently, alarming decrease 
within the last forty years, from a little over five 
to about three and a half. This shrinkage in the 
size of a family being most marked in the so- 
called higher and more intelligent classes in the 
community. But there are two important side 
lights upon this statement, one of which is that this 
decline in the birth rate and shrinkage in the size 
of the family is by no means confined to America, 
but is an absolutely world-wide phenomenon among 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 285 

all civilized nations and, strangely enough, at first 
sight most striking among those who are forcing to 
the front most rapidly, or already leading the van of 
civilization. A further paradox appears in that, 
with the single exception of France, it is precisely 
those nations whose birth rate and number in each 
family are declining most rapidly that are increas- 
ing most rapidly in population. In other words, 
the phenomenon of the declining birth rate is a 
normal and natural accompaniment of progress, 
and the danger usually apprehended from it is 
almost purely imaginary, for the simple reason 
that it is everywhere, again with the exception of 
France, accompanied by an even greater decrease 
in the death rate, so that the net result upon popu- 
lation is one of gain instead of loss. 

It stands to reason that a nation like India, with 
a death rate of over thirty per thousand and an 
average lifetime of barely twenty-two years, needs, 
to hold its own, double the birth rate and average size 
of family of a nation like the United States, with an 
average longevity of forty-three and a death rate 
of seventeen per thousand. It is an unbroken rule 
throughout the animal kingdom that the higher in 
the scale a species rises the slower becomes the rate 
of its reproduction, the longer its period of im- 
maturity and the fewer the number of its offspring. 
And yet not a single instance is on record of a 
superior race having been exterminated by a lower, 



286 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

while scores of cases could be cited where a small 
but aggressive superior species has practically, and 
even absolutely, exterminated a far more numerous 
and inferior one. Just so in human society; it has 
always been the classes that have played upon and 
exploited the masses, never vice versa. 

The whole question of success to-day, both 
national and individual, is a matter not of quantity 
but of quality. This the American mother and 
father, on account of their superior intelligence, are 
more clearly and definitely recognizing than those 
of any other nation to-day, with the exception of 
France, and as a consequence the number of children 
allowed to be born has been deliberately kept down 
to the number that could be most effectively and 
intelligently nurtured, trained and equipped to the 
highest possible pitch for the struggle of existence. 
That much harm has been done, and serious damage 
to health and life incurred, by attempts to limit the 
number of children by abnormal and unwholesome 
means is, of course, regrettably true, but this has 
been a comparatively small matter compared with 
the benefits to both children and parents resulting 
from the process, and the general principle under- 
lying it is sound, both from a biologic and economic 
and ethical point of view. 

As we have seen the limitation of the number of 
children is no new thing, or special vice of civiliza- 
tion. One tribe of our North American Indians, for 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 287 

instance, has six different forms of poisonous plants 
or roots which they use for the purpose of producing 
abortions. The Australian blacks, who have prob- 
ably one of the lowest grades of social organization 
and civilization that have ever been studied, have 
incredibly elaborate and painful methods of reaching 
the same end, which have grown into the dignity of 
a religious rite. Nor is there any more basis for the 
kindred delusion, that in primitive times the re- 
productive process was as simple and natural and 
free from danger as any of the vegetative processes of 
nature. The death rate in childbirth of the savage 
and barbaric nations is higher than that in any 
civilized race, and all medical missionaries and 
government surgeons who have had opportunity 
to care for the women of savage tribes are unanimous 
in testifying that all the accidents and injurious 
after effects of the process, which are supposed to 
be peculiarly the penalty of the feebler physique and 
more sensitive nervous organization of the civilized 
mother, are just as common and disabling in the 
wigwam and the kraal as they are in the tenement 
and the palace. In fact the ease and safety with 
which the savage mother passes through the perils 
of maternity are purely imaginary and of a piece 
with the rest of the myths about the Noble Savage. 
It is like the ancient delusion that the rich have 
more diseases than the poor, simply because no one 
has ever had the decency, or took the trouble, to 



288 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

study out and adequately care for the diseases of 
the latter. Even the old idea that women, by 
civilization and education, were becoming so un- 
natural and feeble that they were no longer able to 
nourish their own children by nature's method, 
has been proved to be almost pure delusion, due 
largely to the perfection of modified and certified 
milks, and to the misleading and blatant adver- 
tisements on every bill board and magazine cover of 
the different kinds of infant foods and other sub- 
stitutes for the real thing, all of which should be 
labelled Baby Poisons, for they kill and stunt at least 
ten times as many children as they save or help. 
In France, where they have really civilized ideas on 
such matters, they have a law making it a mis- 
demeanour to give to any child under one year of 
age any form of solid food, or any solution prepared 
from solid food, without the advice and consent of a 
physician. 

Investigations in a score of cities on both sides of 
the Atlantic show that the average mother in all 
ranks of life, even including the highest, is well 
able to care for her own children in from eighty- 
five to ninety per cent, of all cases. 

In fine, from a physical point of view, no mother 
of history ever was better equipped for her task 
than is the American mother of to-day. And how 
much this means for the welfare of the future gener- 
ation may be glimpsed from the significant fact that 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 289 

nowadays in our best and most modern baby-saving 
stations we feed not the children but the mothers, 
and save fifty per cent, more children's lives than we 
ever did by the most elaborate schemes of sterilizing, 
pasteurizing or modifying cow's milk. What the 
mother is, that will the child be, not only physically, 
but, to an extraordinary degree, mentally and mor- 
ally. It is not so much what you do for your children 
or teach them that counts as what you are. It is 
far more dramatic for a mother to die for her children 
than to live for them; but it is not half so good for 
the children, and maternal self-sacrifice should be bal- 
anced by a good wholesome share of intelligent self- 
ishness in order to develop the best type of children. 
The best mother, both in the beginning and in the 
long run, is the one who takes the best care of her 
own health, of her good looks, and keeps up an in- 
telligent interest in life, so that she may remain 
the delightful chum and the valued adviser of her 
children all their lives long. 

Looked at from this point of view the third 
charge against the American mother, that her am- 
bition for independence and public recognition is 
causing her to neglect the duties of her home, rings 
as empty as any of the others. Although the move- 
ment has naturally, here and there, run into 
bizarre and childish extremes, the main impulse 
underlying it is the fact that woman is outgrowing 
her ancient status, which was frankly that of slave 



2 9 o WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and house servant for life, and beginning to assert 
her own individuality to the end that she may im- 
press that individuality upon her children and 
become their guide and protector not merely in the 
nursery stage and within the limits of the picket 
fence around the home lot but also during the much 
more critical and dangerous period of adolescence, 
girlhood and young manhood. 

The increasing participation of women in business 
affairs is at bottom an attempt to make the street, 
the mill, the counting house and the store as clean, 
as healthful and as wholesome environments for 
boys and girls, and incidentally for women and 
men as well, as the home now is, and I can hardly 
conceive of any lover of his kind and friend of helpful 
progress failing to do otherwise than sympathize 
with them heartily. We have, to a disastrous de- 
gree, forgotten our obligations to our children in 
our attempts to build up industries, to carve out 
fortunes, to conquer the forces of nature. The^real 
end and aim of all these triumphs is the child himself 
as the emblem of the future of the race. Until 
even our greatest cities are wholesome, happy places 
for children to grow up in, our civilization will be 
crippled, abnormal, and a failure upon one of its 
most important sides. And we children of a larger 
growth need this intelligent, humane consideration 
and will profit just as much by it as our little 
ones would. The club-joining, committee-belonging, 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 291 

movement-promoting mother of to-day is simply 
endeavouring to organize and apply the greatest 
force known to humanity, the one great civilizing 
power — cooperation — to the problem of extend- 
ing her care, and the care of humanity, over her 
children from the first ten or twelve years of their 
lives in the home to the equally important ten or 
twelve years when they are beginning to get their 
real start in and hold upon life. If any of the re- 
quirements of business, the sacred rights of property, 
or even of our most precious and antiquated politi- 
cal institutions and traditions are in the way, then 
so much the worse for them; if they conflict with the 
spirit of the new movement they ought to be wiped 
out, and many of them should have been on general 
principles a generation or more ago. 

The direct result in woman of this increasing 
interest in public affairs is so to stimulate her in- 
telligence and to increase her breadth of view as 
to make her not less efficient in the care and man- 
agement of her children and her house but far more 
so. If there be any problem in the world which is 
in urgent need of the application of a little twentieth 
century intelligence and point of view to it it is 
the one of keeping house. In point of planning, of 
organization, of labour-saving devices, yes, even of 
sanitation, it is fifty years behind any other of the 
great productive industries of the day. The best we 
can do to remedy the situation is to let the women 



292 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

engaged in it get out of it long enough and far 
enough so that they can get a good view of it from 
the outside, instead of leaving them swimming round, 
and round, and round in it, like gold-fish in a bowl, 
three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, all their 
lives long. That sort of isolated, perpetual drown- 
ing in petty details would dull the most brilliant 
intellect and kill initiative in anybody. 

There is no better training for intelligent, sanitary, 
efficient housekeeping and home making than a 
short business or other public career before mar- 
riage. We are doing everything we possibly can to 
increase the intelligence and efficiency of the workers 
in all our other great productive industries — mills, 
and factories, and shops, and schools — shortening 
the hours, raising the wages, improving sanitary 
conditions — -and yet we throw up our hands in horror 
at all proposals to increase the intelligence and the 
individuality of the workers in our greatest, most 
vital, and most profoundly important productive 
industry, for fear it will make them less efficient. 
The woman who has broadened her intelligence, 
increased the horizon of both her knowledge and her 
sympathy, developed her individuality, her judgment 
and her self-respect, by that most wholesome and 
profitable form of all educations, earning her own 
living, and making a success of it, is as much superior 
to the old-fashioned rule of thumb, wash-day, 
baking-day way, grandmother-used-to-do-it type 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 293 

of housekeeper as a steam engine is to the stage 
coach. This is not a mere glittering generality- 
based upon a priori reasoning. Ask any doctor 
of twenty years' experience in any American-born 
community or class, and he will tell you without 
hesitation, nine times out of ten, that the best 
mothers, the best kept and most healthy homes, and 
the best trained and fed and cared for children 
are in families where the mother has either earned 
her own living as a teacher, a clerk, a shop girl, or 
intelligent factory operative, or has had either the 
means or the determination to specially develop 
her intelligence and her individuality by, say a 
college course, or some form of private study or 
interest, or active work in philanthropic and the 
more intelligent social movements. Time and again 
I have heard the expression from my colleagues: 
"Now that's a family it's a real pleasure to practise 
medicine in; that mother is almost as good as a 
trained nurse, and better than a good many, because 
she knows how to use her brains in an emergency, 
instead of being carried off her feet by her emotions, 
or stampeded by her feelings." There is no better 
mother anywhere on earth, in my private opinion, 
from a very extensive experience on both sides of 
the Atlantic, none within twenty per cent, as good, as 
the intelligent, self-respecting, independent, Amer- 
ican mother of to-day. 

It is true that her independence, her self-respect, 



294 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and her regard for the interests of her children lead 
her to divorce her husband, or separate from a 
worthless or selfish husband, about once in ten or 
twelve marriages; but this is only what European 
women long to do, if they but dared, and there are 
few habits which have had a more improving effect 
upon the wholesomeness and happiness of the 
atmosphere in the modern home than this. So long 
as a husband practically owns his wife for life, un- 
less he commits and is convicted of a gross and serious 
crime, as was the state of affairs under the old 
regime, and is yet in Europe, so long will there be 
many, many homes which, instead of being like a 
little heaven below, will much more closely resemble 
the other place of future abode. I can conceive of 
nothing which has a more wholesome and pleas- 
ing and beneficial effect upon both the character 
and the conduct of a certain type of husband than 
the knowledge that his wife is financially and so- 
cially independent of him, and that she will leave 
him promptly for the sake of her children if his 
conduct does not measure up to her standards of 
right, and decency, and courtesy. 

It is this same fairer and broader view of life and 
its problems which is largely responsible for that 
marked change in the attitude of the American 
mother and, for the matter of that, the American 
father, toward their children which is so loudly 
deplored and denounced by melancholy moralists 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 295 

and disciplinarians of all sorts under the term of 
spoiling. As a matter of fact, it is the spoiled child 
who is really fitted for success in life. He knows 
what he wants and how to get it. He has a high 
respect for himself and plenty of initiative. It won't 
do him a particle of harm to butt his head three or 
four times against the wall of failure in getting what 
he wants. He will strike a balance between what he 
imagines himself to be and what he really is, in the 
stern school of experience quickly enough. He has 
got the one great and indispensable qualification 
for success, individuality, initiative, willingness to 
work for what he wants, and to try to make every- 
thing bend to his own wants. He can't go very 
far outside of the nursery without discovering first 
that he must recognize the limits imposed by the 
strength and desires of others, and that he must 
make treaties with them in some way to secure their 
cooperation in getting what he wants in return 
for not getting what they want. This is the basis 
of what we are pleased to term morality and self- 
control. The only way and place a child will learn 
it is by actual experience, either in the family circle 
if it is big enough, or on the playground. Preaching, 
teaching, and the implanting of musty ideals have 
no more practical effect upon him than the classical 
water on a duck's back, and usually chiefly succeed 
in disgusting him with the very name of morality 
or piety, or if he be plastic and cowardly enough, 



296 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

in making a little hypocrite of him before his 
time. 

The day of reverence in the family, indeed of that 
feeling by any human being for any other, has gone 
by. Our sense of humour and of proportion has 
destroyed all that. One of our great popular 
preachers voiced the ancient ideal in vivid terms 
the other day. The child, he said, should be taught 
to regard its father as God's viceregent upon earth. 
How many of us American parents, I wonder, would 
have the face to stand up before our hopeful offspring 
and deliver ourselves of such a preposterous senti- 
ment and keep our faces straight while we did 
it? God's viceregents on earth! It is only fair to 
say that the reverend gentleman was an English- 
man and hence not to blame for his lack of a sense 
of humour. John Knox's uncompromising phrase 
addressed to King James, "God's silly vassal," would 
be much nearer the truth as we know ourselves. 
Who and what are we that we should undertake to 
impose our laws and our preferences and prejudices 
and our individualities absolutely upon another, even 
if that other be our own child ? The best way to teach 
him to respect the individuality, the rights and the 
feelings of others is to teach him to respect his own. 

It is astonishing what a perfect little code of 
natural, wholesome morality an intelligent, kindly 
treated, little disciplined and unbossed child will 
develop for himself before he is ten years old. All 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 297 

we need to do as parents is to treat our children 
kindly, feed, clothe, house, and play them well, 
and if there be anything worthy of respect or 
imitation about us they will find it out quickly 
enough. If there is not, we won't make them be- 
lieve it simply by telling them so, no matter how 
often we repeat it. One of the safest and most 
wholesome of corrective mottoes that I know of, for 
the parent considering his duties toward morals 
and the disciplinary training of his children, is that 
phrase of the current philosophy of the street to- 
day "Why do we take ourselves so — seriously?" 
Most of the atmosphere of scolding and reproach 
which marred the old-fashioned home, the ideal 
family life of the past, was due to the exhausted 
nerves and tempers of mothers weakened and soured 
by overwork, excessive child-bearing and respon- 
sibility, lack of fresh air and sunshine, and of 
intelligent amusement and change of interests. 
Much of the ancient and awful discipline of respect 
exacted for parents, of absolute prohibition of 
any "back talk," and of the attitude represented 
by such mottoes as "Children should be seen and 
not heard," was due to the desire to protect pa- 
rental characters, conduct, and motives from the 
merciless and humiliating criticism of the enfant 
terrible. Part to the fact that the father seldom 
returned home save when utterly worn out and 
exhausted with toil or business cares, so tired that 



298 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

he was utterly unfitted for anything but absolute 
rest, and the noisy play and gasconading chatter of 
the children rasped his poisoned nerves into fury 
and he had no vitality to enter into their plays 
and interests. That form of training for children 
is best which provides, first, the most intelligent, 
the most truthful, and most kindly parents, and 
then brings their children into the most intimate 
contact with them, with perfect freedom of con- 
duct, and mutual self-respect and affection on 
both sides. This is the reason why the American 
child, in spite of his spoiling, his lack of reverence, 
and indulgence in all kinds of alleged unwholesome 
foods, and his precocious social development, turns 
out so remarkably well in the vast majority of cases. 
He is placed on the same sort of footing in his home 
that he will afterward have to stand on in life. 
The petty shifts of middle-aged, feeble minds and 
of mediocrity for enforcing proper respect from the 
young, and keeping them in their proper places, 
which encumber and cobweb every department of 
life and vigour of human activity in Europe, have 
been pretty well swept away here, though the process 
has not gone far enough yet. We hardly know 
what a snub or a "wigging" or a taking-down, or a 
sitting-upon-hard are in this country any more. It 
is no longer considered good form for school teachers, 
managers and foremen of businesses and shops, 
officials in the public service, even wealthy uncles 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 299 

and crochety aunts and grandparents to treat with 
brusque severity and gross discourtesy either the 
children committed to their care, or the most up- 
start of young employees or inferiors. Consequently 
our children have no blind reverence about them, 
that is to say, no fear of having, metaphorically 
speaking, their knuckles rapped or their faces 
slapped whenever in their innocence and awkward- 
ness, or even what we are pleased to term, their 
impudence, they happen to blurt out something that 
is displeasing to a short-tempered or conceited elder 
or superior. Shyness is a sign of fear, and intelli- 
gently trained and kindly treated children should 
know little or nothing of fear. 

Broadly speaking, to spoil a child, provided of 
course that the process be kept within reasonable 
limits, is to put him on his own basis of conduct, 
action, and morality at as early a period as possible. 
To discipline a child, or to bring him up strictly, 
is to impose somebody else's standard of conduct 
and propriety upon him, and the natural result is that 
distressing phenomenon known as the sowing of wild 
oats. The minute a child gets his liberty he pro- 
ceeds to make use of it, and the experiments he makes 
with his new hatchet at eighteen or twenty may 
damage him for life, while those which he would have 
made in the nursery would have resulted in nothing 
more than a few cut fingers. 

The spoiled child of to-day is usually by twelve or 



3 oo WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

thirteen years of age, a perfectly companionable, 
live-withable little being, whose reason can be 
appealed to, whose promises, when secured, de- 
pended upon, and who will cooperate with you in 
any scheme of either play or work upon an effective 
and rational basis. The well-trained and thoroughly 
disciplined youngster of fifty years ago, at the same 
age, was often a perfect little devil of mischief and 
brainless adventuresomeness the moment that his 
parent's or teacher's back was turned. He would 
promise you anything and then do exactly as he 
pleased just as soon as he got out of sight, and if 
one of a little group of truants lied about what he 
had been doing, all the rest of them would back him 
up and regard such loyalty, no matter what its 
results, as the highest and most binding type of 
morality that they knew. Largely as the result 
of the absolute repression with which he had been 
treated, he would often indulge in the most foolish, 
and even cruel and disgusting, practices in private, 
just to assert his right to do something which was 
forbidden, something of his own accord, which we 
then contemplated with uplifted hands as another 
of the many evidences of Original Sin. 

Another factor in the success of the American 
mother is the extent to which she has been enabled, 
on account of more wholesome and primitive 
surroundings of American life, to get rid of that 
abominable substitute and subterfuge for maternal 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 301 

duties, the nursemaid. There have been few in- 
fluences in family life which have done more to 
lower the moral standards and impair the refinement 
and the tastes of the rising generation than to 
commit young children at the most impressionable 
age of their life to the care and companionship 
of ignorant, stupid, often vulgar and indecent nurse- 
maids and other feminine field-hands of that de- 
scription. There can be no hiring of substitutes in 
this war. Every mother should spend at least one 
half of her time, and every father at least one 
quarter of his, in the direct personal care and edu- 
cation of their children. Shirking of this duty is 
treason to the race and to one's best self. Servants 
may be kindness and devotion itself, but they're 
a mighty poor substitute for real fathers and mothers, 
especially of the more intelligent class. There is 
a flavour about the child brought up chiefly in 
the nursery or under the care of servants, no 
matter how well trained, that is unmistakable. A 
free-born and unspoiled child does not like to lie, 
but he quickly learns the trick of fibbing if he has 
much to do with servants, who are still practically 
in the slave status, and whose only protection lies 
in the slave virtues of submission and deceit. The 
healthy, untrained child is almost absolutely fearless. 
Leave him much of his time with servants, and before 
he is five years old he is desperately afraid df the 
dark, his little imagination is stocked full of shapes 



302 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

of terror and of danger of things that will catch him 
out of dark corners if he isn't a good boy, of giant 
cats that will come in through a window and eat 
him up if he doesn't go to sleep at once when his 
maid wants to get away for the evening; and before 
he is ten years old his clean little mind is crammed 
with all the vulgarity, the -coarseness and indecency 
and debasing superstition which has been accumu- 
lating in the countryside and the stable-yard for 
the last five hundred years. 

The more closely a child can be compelled to as- 
sociate with his parents, within reasonable limits, 
the better it is for both — though it will be a little 
hard on the child sometimes. If you want your 
child to grow up civilized, keep him in the twentieth 
century while he is growing up, instead of relegating 
him to the dark ages of the nursery, or boarding 
school, and then wondering why he grows up such 
a young savage. This greater amount of personal 
care of our own children will, it is true, require a 
considerable recasting of our stupid and antiquated 
hours of business and plans of work, but that will be 
found to be one of its chief advantages. Every 
working day, from that of the bricklayer to the Danker, 
should be so planned as to allow time not merely 
for proper rest, but wholesome recreation and social 
intercourse, including that with our own children 
and families. The net result will be, as shown now 
by thousands of experiments all with the same result, 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 303 

that the amount of work done in the seven or eight 
hours of labour, will be twenty to forty per cent, 
greater and its quality improved in the same propor- 
tion. There is nothing we do quite so stupidly as work. 

Another curse of medievalism which the Ameri- 
can mother has largely escaped is the boarding 
school. This institution is in part an evasion of 
parental duties, a hiring of cheap substitutes instead 
of fighting the battle yourself, and in part a survival 
of the old Puritan, priestly distrust of nature, the 
fear lest the child's mother will love him so much that 
she will not discipline him and harden him properly, 
a sentiment which found its frankest expression 
from the lips of the headmaster of one of England's 
most famous boy barracks: "The boy's mother is 
often his worst enemy." The boarding school 
for boys is, in fact, very largely a survival of that 
distrust of and contempt for woman, as such, 
which was a characteristic of the early Church and 
of the Dark Ages. 

The institution had a certain amount of rational 
basis in the days when reading and writing were 
rare and wonderful accomplishments, and when 
families of education and refinement were scat- 
tered about, singly or in twos and threes at long 
distances from each other, and surrounded largely 
by a mob of servants or illiterate day labourers. But 
these conditions have changed radically — in fact 
in this country, fortunately, almost utterly disap- 



3 o 4 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

peared. And I can conceive to-day of no atmos- 
phere half so wholesome and improving for any 
child to grow up in, till at least the age of sixteen 
or eighteen, as his or her own family, or any 
school so desirable and so healthful for normal, 
sensible growth, both mentally and morally, as the 
public school of the country, village, or town in 
which he happens to be born. All the graces and 
accomplishments and social airs which may be 
required are but leather and prunella, which can be 
laid upon and varnished over this foundation 
of health, character, and brains in a couple of years 
by any skilful parlour varnisher and deportment 
expert. Though, as a matter of fact, most children 
will acquire these little arts and graces for them- 
selves if they are allowed to mingle freely with 
their own family and friends upon all sorts of oc- 
casions, instead of being deliberately excluded for 
fear they may be in the way till they grow awkward 
and self-conscious and then suddenly launched into 
society with great fuss and ceremony, and formally 
permitted to "come out" of the state of unnatural 
rawness and clumsiness into which they should 
never have been driven. Most children if kindly 
treated and placed on their own responsibility, 
and encouraged to respect themselves, have natur- 
ally good manners. 

The success of the American mother is in part 
due to the fact that she has a greater freedom of 



THE AMERICAN MOTHER 305 

choice in selecting the father of her children, and 
in deciding whether she will keep him or not if 
he proves unworthy, and to the further fact that 
she is putting her brains into her business of 
child-bearing, child-rearing, and home-keeping, and 
training and developing her powers to the highest 
possible degree for this purpose. The one point 
in which she could be improved is in regard to the 
direction in which part of that training is expended. 
Most of the higher education of women is a cheap 
imitation of the higher education of men, and as 
this is still a survival of the Middle Ages, the result 
is an enormous waste of time and energy upon dead 
languages, pure mathematics, and a strange mummy 
called pure literature, with all the life frozen 
out of it. However, our great democratic Middle 
West universities are leading the way now to a 
more rational, wholesome standard, and when the 
American mother is as thoroughly trained in the 
knowledge of her own wonderful body and that of 
her child, and their needs, in her knowledge of the 
chemistry of foods, and of physics, and hygiene, 
of ventilation and house management as she is in 
literature and dead languages and the undying 
stupidities and formalities of formal education, 
when she knows more of the effect of heredity and 
environment on the future of herself and her chil- 
dren and grandchildren than she does of the failures 
and stupidities and blunders of the past under the 



3 o6 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

name of history, then the millennium will really- 
come, and we won't need to go to heaven to get it. 
The average American mother of the day being, 
fortunately, from our fairer and more equable 
distribution of wealth and resources, neither an 
overworked drudge nor a brainless parasite, is able 
to devote, and is devoting, more of her time, more 
of her thought, and more of her society to her chil- 
dren than any other mother in the civilized world. 



CHAPTER XIV 



THE DELICATE CHILD 



THOUGH we worship principles and have a 
profound admiration for rules, our real 
interest is in exceptions. If we had some 
way of foretelling in advance exactly what was 
going to happen half of us would commit suicide 
out of sheer boredom. We know that everything 
proceeds along the remorseless sequence of cause 
and effect, and that it is vanity or worse to expect 
grapes of thorns or figs of thistles; but we can't 
help hoping that logic will prove a liar this time, 
and we live largely in the hope of the unexpected 
thing happening. Our principles and our hopes 
are as deliciously inconsistent as the Irishman 
who, after weighing his long-fatted pig at market, 
regretfully announced that "the crather didn't 
weigh as much as he expected — an', faith, he 
niver thought it would!" 

Two and two we know make four — but perhaps 
some day they will make four and a half or even 
five; and this may be the time. This is the charm 
of gambling: that somehow, sometime, the good 
luck, which we know we have done nothing to 

307 



3 o8 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

deserve and have no logical right to expect, will 
come to us. Most of us would rather make a 
hundred dollars on a long shot or a lucky throw 
than a thousand in the ordinary course of trade 
or service rendering, not so much because we object 
to the greasy drudgery of labour or slow monotony 
of business, but chiefly for the inherent charm of 
getting money "like finding it." The unexpected, 
the exceptional, has a peculiar and never-failing 
attraction and charm for us. That 's why we take 
such an apparently morbid and abnormal delight 
in stories of murder and bloodshed and crime — 
because they so seldom happen. Most of us will 
live patiently through a long life without seeing one 
really soul-satisfying and dramatic killing. We 
get so desperately sick and tired of the dull monotony 
of respectability and morality and propriety that 
we become as ravenous for the sensational and the 
gruesome as colts in a clover pasture are for salt. 
Like the angel child, Toddy, we croon to ourselves 
over and over again, with gfroulish delight: "And 
BliafPs head was bluggy — bluggy as ev'ryfink!" 
Absurd, irrational and, to the moralist and prov- 
erb-maker, lamentable, there is something sound 
and sane at the bottom of this instinct. Nature, 
like wisdom, is justified of her children. We do 
well to be keenly interested and to waste much 
time in speculating over the exceptional, for here 
is the seedbed of new discoveries, the starting- 



THE DELICATE CHILD 309 

point of new conquests. Here is the fault in 
the mountain chain that lets us see how the rest 
of the solid, level earth is built and planned; here 
is the gash in the smooth and unbroken skin of 
circumstances that exposes to view nerves and 
arteries and muscles beneath; here is the crack in. 
the dull mask of familiarity that gives us a glimpse 
of volcanoes behind it. It is the study of the ab- 
normal that often gives our first clue to the mystery" 
of the normal. All our knowledge of the wonder-' 
ful perfection of the human machine began with 
the study of its breakdowns. Here is one 
reason why we should not destroy the weaklings, 
or be in too great haste painlessly to eliminate the 
unfit. 

Nowhere is our study of and interest in the 
exceptional better justified than in that wonderful 
little bundle of explosive complexities, the child. 
We know, of course, and have known in a general 
way for centuries, that what we as parents ought 
most to desire, and as teachers to be interested in, 
is the child who weighs between eight and ten 
pounds at birth; who doubles his weight the first 
year and sprouts two inches farther up the yard- 
stick every successive birthday; who begins to 
walk at fifteen or sixteen months, and to talk at 
eighteen or twenty; who is of just the right size 
and intelligence to be dropped into the hopper 
of our educational mill at five years of age and 



3to WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

to be ground along through the successive years 
with the rest of the human grist, and survive the 
process without apparent harm. 

Fortunately, such is the directive power of hered- 
ity, somewhere from eighty-five to ninety-five per 
cent, of each year's annual crop of children are born 
like this and grow like this ; and it is well for the sta- 
bility and prosperity and comfort of the community 
that it is so. A good, rock-ribbed, substantial 
foundation of honest mediocrity, of brainless in- 
dustriousness, of monotonously uninteresting sanity, 
even of wholesome stupidity, is necessary for the 
continuation of the race and of civilization. Our 
great systems of education, with their worship of 
routine and lack of imagination, have decided that, 
since at least eighty-five to ninety-fiive per cent, of 
children are like that, this is the only kind of chil- 
dren that exists for practical purposes, the only kind 
they need bother their heads about. Hence our 
educational mill is built upon the admirable and 
ingenious system known in our factories as 
u standardization" and "interchangeable parts," 
illustrated in most striking form a few years ago 
by one of our great watch companies. They poured 
out into a tray the wheels, pinions, cases, hands, 
and so on of five thousand watches, shook them 
up together thoroughly, and then set a mechanic 
to pick out of the tangled heap at random the parts 
required for a watch and put them together. The 



THE DELICATE CHILD 311 

resulting haphazard watch ran perfectly and kept 
within a minute a day of accurate time. 

According to the rules of our educational sys- 
tem, every child at a given age is exactly like every 
other child of the same age and size — or if it is 
not it should be made so; and the same methods, 
measures and standards are to be applied im- 
partially to all. The system acts badly enough, 
upon even the eighty-five per cent, of average com- 
mon-place, normal children; but when it comes 
to the exceptional child whether the exception- 
ally gifted or the unusually defective then the 
result is most disastrous, either to the system 
or to the child and sometimes to both. 

Usually the child gets the worst of it, and for 
the simple and significant reason suggested by 
the famous Stephenson, inventor of the locomotive, 
who when appearing before a Parliamentary com- 
mittee for permission to open his first railroad, 
eleven miles in length, was pompously asked by 
a local big- wig: "But what, pray, Mr. Stephenson 
would be the consequences supposing that a cow got 
on the track?" "Well," said Stephenson in his 
Lancashire brogue, "it would be soa much t' worse 
for t' coo!" 

Mothers, God bless them! know better and 
have always known better. With the beautiful 
instinct of maternity that, though we sometimes 
deprecate it in our superior way as irrational and 



312 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

even regrettable, we cannot help admiring, it is 
the unusual child in the family who has always 
come in for the greatest dower and heritage of 
affection and of tender care. Whether the ex- 
ceptionalness be plus or minus, so to speak, the 
little one endowed with rare and special gifts or 
pitiably deficient in some of his senses and powers, 
the result has been ever the same — the weakliest 
child is the best beloved and receives the warmest 
affection. And this singular sentiment, which has 
been so often commented on and even stigmatized 
as unjust and morbid, is now found to be abundantly 
justified. First, because normal children will to 
a large extent, if given kindly treatment and good 
surroundings, grow up of themselves and become 
pretty much what they are born to be, regardless 
of punishments and scoldings and so-called in- 
struction. Second, because many of these ugly 
ducklings, so dear to the mother's heart, will turn 
out, when finally they have reached the full zenith 
of their powers, which may take longer than the 
shorter flight of the average child, birds of rarest 
plumage or brilliant song. 

On the other hand, though those children born 
normal will grow and develop healthfully and nor- 
mally — I had almost said inevitably and irre- 
pressibly — under the ordinary favourable en- 
vironment, those who are born abnormal by 
defect have little or no such tendency. Without 



THE DELICATE CHILD 313 

special and expert care and attention they may 
remain practically as childish and as incapable of 
caring for themselves at fifteen as at five; but, 
by proper special training and care, two thirds of 
them may be caused to develop fairly normally 
up to the fifteen-year level; which means that 
they are capable of supporting and caring for 
themselves and, to a reasonable degree, of enjoy- 
ing life. 

Don't on any account neglect the average "com- 
mon or garden" child. He is well worth all the 
time and care you can spend on him; but put your 
ablest intellects, your divinest patiences, at work 
on the problem of the exceptional — yes, even of 
the abnormal — child; for among those brambles 
and tares you will reap some of the finest and 
most perfect of the wheat. Havelock Ellis for 
instance, found in his brilliant Study of British 
Genius that no less than fifteen per cent, of the 
great men of English history were recorded by 
their biographers as "of notably feeble physical con- 
stitution" in childhood. 

It is when we find ourselves confronted with one 
of these problem children, one of these frail, quaint, 
dreamy, hyper-sensitive little beings, who "lacks 
stamina," who has no desire to eat with both hands 
and the whole surface of his face back to his ears, 
and, in Choate's quaint phrase, "has no constitution 
to speak of, but is living under the by-laws," that 



314 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

we really have to call our brains into play and 
show what stuff we are made of. 

We have a somewhat curious idea of what con- 
stitutes strength or a good constitution in a child. 
In itself, of course, the strongest and sturdiest 
baby is a tiny, feeble, puny creature. The secret 
of its strength, the trick of its success in life, con- 
sists in its ability to absorb energy from its environ- 
ment and turn it to its own use. A baby is simply 
a sponge in mannikin form, capable of sucking up 
the sun power of the universe and turning it into 
growth, action and thought. How far that process 
of suction will go, how complete will be its success, 
is as impossible to prophesy, during infancy or 
early childhood, as it is to tell what kind of a crop 
a young apple tree is going to bear from inspecting 
it when it is eighteen inches high. 

A great many so-called delicate children are so 
only in appearance and have really exceedingly 
good and enduring constitutions, but they have 
difficulty in getting the first beginnings of this 
suction process properly established. That's what 
maternal love was invented for and where the new 
doctor comes in. W T e used to have the idea, even 
in the medical profession, that children were born 
either with or without a definite something known 
as "a good constitution"; and that, if they did not 
have it it was hardly worth while trying to raise 
them. Our attitude was about as rational as that 



THE DELICATE CHILD 315 

of the dear old lady of ninety who, on receiving 
the announcement of the death of her eldest son 
at the age of seventy-two, ejaculated: "Dear, dear, 
dear! I always told Josiah we never would be 
able to raise that child.'' 

Many and many a delicate child, if he can be 
steered and nursed and coaxed through the stormy 
first period of adjustment to his environment, 
grows up into a vigorous, able, long-lived man 
or woman. One of the most desirable faculties 
in catching and drinking in the sun power is quick, 
active response to all the influences that come 
from the environment. In the average elastic, 
happy-go-lucky, thick-skinned youngster, this re- 
sponse is just keen enough to serve its purpose 
and never becomes overmasteringly powerful; but 
in the delicate child the response to certain kinds 
of stimuli is so intense, so vivid and overwhelming, 
that it throws him off his balance and prevents his 
proper reaction to other messages. He is so fas- 
cinated by books and make-believe and pictures 
that he forgets to eat. His memories of what he 
has seen and heard are so vivid and overmastering 
that he cannot get to sleep at night, or his dreams 
rob his slumbers of their proper refreshment. 

Just keep that young dreamer firmly in con- 
tact with mother earth for ten or fifteen years by 
playing in the dirt nine hours of the day, eating 
for three and sleeping the other twelve; use all 



316 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

your ingenuity to make his food more interesting 
to him than his books and pictures — and out of the 
same stuff of which his dreams are made he will 
build great buildings, carve out a fortune for him- 
self, paint pictures to gladden the world, and 
win new discoveries in science or inventions in 
industry. Many a so-called delicate child is deli- 
cate simply because he needs hatching, not merely 
for the customary period, but from nine to nineteen 
years longer. 

There are, of course a certain number of abnor- 
mal children who — poor innocents — are abnormal 
by reason of some form of definite physical or 
mental defect; but they are happily a very small 
minority. The best and most careful estimates 
now find barely one half of one per cent, of all 
children in such state. The overwhelming prob- 
ability is that the delicate or, as we now sometimes 
term it the atypical child is so on account of some 
lack of proper adjustment, either delayed or pre- 
cocious, to the ordinary environment; and our 
problem as parents, physicians and teachers is 
diligently to hunt for the point or points of mal- 
adjustment and correct them. The more ex- 
perience we have, the more the wonder grows 
at the cheering and admirable results that may 
be obtained from even the most apparently un- 
promising material by patient intelligence and 
unwearying kindness. 



THE DELICATE CHILD 317 

The delightful difference between a child and 
a machine is that, the moment you find and remove 
one point of maladjustment, you start an upward and 
improving impulse which runs through the whole 
circle of its activities. You remove adenoids, for 
instance, and improve the child's hearing; thereby 
you promptly release him from the false reproach 
of stupidity, or even disobedience, because he can't 
hear what's said to him, and he regains his place 
in his classes — his self-respect. He is no longer 
kept in after school — and thus gets his full play- 
time; his appetite is improved, his sleep is better 
and he is started toward a higher level all along 
the line. Straighten his crooked teeth or fill the 
decaying ones and you improve both his appetite 
and his digestion; you increase his weight, increase 
his vigour and power of attention both in the 
schoolroom and outdoors; increase his resisting 
power to the colds and sore throats and stomach 
troubles, whose germs are perpetually wandering 
about seeking whom they may devour — and your 
ailing, backward, cold-catching child is improved 
twenty-five per cent. 

Some delicate children are weakly and deficient 
in vigour on account of the sins, voluntary or 
involuntary, of their parents. If the mother has 
been underfed or overworked during that wondrous 
sacred period of the creation of a new life, when 
every energy and every power that she possesses 



3i8 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

ought to be bent and turned solely to this one 
great end, her child is liable to be born weakly 
and to die, within the first few months or years y 
of either what we politely and pompously term 
"inanition" or "marasmus," both of which really 
mean that the child was starved to death before 
it was born, if the Hibernicism be pardoned. 

Nature is far more careful of the new life than 
of the old. If there is any nourishment to be had 
the baby will get it from the mother and grow like 
a parasite within her body at her expense; but she 
cannot work miracles and, in spite of all her fa- 
voritism, from one third to two fifths of the deaths 
that occur during the first year of life among the 
children of our labouring and manufacturing classes 
are due to this form of prenatal starvation. The best 
way to feed the child, not merely during its period of 
prenatal life but also during its first year of mundane 
existence, is through the mother. An effective 
way of preventing one class — and not a small 
one — of delicate children would be by a formal 
endowment of maternity, securing to every pros- 
pective mother, in whatever rank of life the best 
and most abundant of food, the wholesomest of 
surroundings and the completest of rest; and no 
other money spent by the State would pay such an 
abundant return on the investment. 

Another cause of delicacy in childhood, not a 
very common one but sadly far from rare, is the 



THE DELICATE CHILD 319 

Plague of the First-born. This setting of the 
children's teeth on edge because the fathers have 
eaten sour grapes may crop up in every grade 
of society and, thanks to our idiotic and ostrich-like 
policy of concealment of the all-important facts 
about it, in homes of the purest morality and highest 
refinement; in fact, it is the peculiar blight of royal 
families and aristocracies, and is a possibility for 
which we should always be on the sharpest and 
keenest lookout from the earliest week of life. Not 
more than one innocent babe in two hundred is born 
doomed by this plague, but the transformation that 
is wrought by a few grains of God's second greatest 
remedial gift to man, mercury, is little short of 
magical, changing the snuffling, pasty-faced, ailing, 
wrinkled-skinned baby into a plump, comfortable, 
pink-and-white youngster — to say nothing of 
preventing him from growing up stunted, blear- 
eyed, broken-toothed, with the arteries and ner- 
vous system of an old, old man. Any baby 
with a reasonable or even the faintest suggestion 
of this taint should be given the benefit of the 
doubt and a course of the remedy, no matter what 
the social and moral standing of either or both 
parents. 

It is a mercifully fortunate coincidence that the 
only common disease in which the iniquities of 
the fathers are visited directly upon the children 
is the one for which we have the surest specific 



320 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

cure. Thanks to mercury, even the infant so 
tainted has a fair chance to "break even." 

For the most part, in dealing with the delicate 
or unusual child, the bugaboo of heredity need 
not very seriously disturb us. Complex and won- 
drous and conceited as we are, we are little but 
carriers for the germ plasm, lanterns to protect 
from the ruder gusts of circumstance the torch of 
the life of the race within us. Very, very few 
acquired characteristics are transmitted; and almost 
the only way in which we can possibly affect the 
next generation is either to starve or poison by 
the toxins of infectious disease, or by external 
poisons like alcohol or lead, the blood which nour- 
ishes the germ cells within our bodies. 

If you have avoided chronic starvation, alcohol 
to the point of saturation, and the race plague, 
you may face the future of your children with a 
conscience fairly clear of misgivings as to any 
handicaps they may have inherited from you. 
So unbroken has been the continuity of the germ 
plasm, so little affected is it by the series of bodies, 
the successive temples in which its light has been 
shrined, that ninety per cent, of the characteristics 
of your child date back at least to the Norman 
conquest or the wars of Charlemagne; and your 
personal contribution to or influence upon his hered- 
ity is probably less than five per cent., which is a 
humiliating but perhaps a consoling reflection. 



THE DELICATE CHILD 321 

The few hereditary diseases which survive — 
such as epilepsy, certain forms of insanity, sick 
headache, and possibly alcoholism — are now re- 
garded rather as unbalanced or defective states 
of certain parts of the nervous system that render 
them liable to break down or to react unfavorably 
under ordinary strains, but are eight times out of ten 
capable of being trained and fed into normal vigor 
and resisting power, rather than as specific tenden- 
cies toward the development of any special form 
of vice or defect. Under ordinary surroundings, 
half of the offspring of even the drunkard or the 
epileptic will probably grow up normal, unless he 
has mated with another victim of his own defect. 
So that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the 
future of your child lies almost absolutely in your 
own hands, with odds of twenty to one in favour of 
his growing up normal and wholesome and vigorous, 
if you only avoid doing anything positively injurious 
or obstructive. 

Don't worry about your gout, or your neuras- 
thenia, or your New England conscience, or your 
quick temper; your child will probably never know 
there is such a thing — unless you give him too 
many illustrations and examples. 

It is really surprising how large a share of so- 
called delicacy and backwardness in children is 
due to a perfectly preventable group of causes — 
namely, the acute infectious diseases. Exceedingly 



322 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

few children, for instance, are born deaf or dumb, 
or with defective sight, and very few either crippled 
or deformed. Ninety per cent, of these conditions 
are emphatically acquired; in other words, a cripple, 
a blind child, a hunchback, a deaf-mute, is nine 
times out of ten a manufactured product and it 
is perfectly possible to stop this branch of the 
manufacturing industry. 

The little fevers of infancy, the diseases of child- 
hood, are by no means the trifling and unimportant 
things which we were at one time inclined to regard 
them. Their death-rate, though low, totals nearly 
fifty thousand deaths a year in the United States 
alone; and, though this is bad enough, we are 
becoming more and more convinced that their most 
serious effect upon the race is the scars and the 
marks and the damages that they leave upon 
the survivors. Many and many a case of delicacy 
and feebleness and lack of thrift and vigour is 
due to the mark left upon the little sufferer's kid- 
neys, or heart, or liver, or nervous system by an 
imperfect recovery from an attack of one of these 
trifling disorders. Eight tenths of all our so- 
called chronic degenerations of the kidneys, heart, 
bloodvessels, liver, and nervous system are now 
attributed chiefly to after effects of one of these 
acute infections, either in infancy or childhood 
or in early adult life. 

Fortunately one simple method is the best known 



THE DELICATE CHILD 323 

preventive and the nearest thing to a certain cure 
for these after effects and " hangovers"; and that 
Is complete and absolute rest during the period of 
convalescence and until full recovery, not merely 
of the former weight but of normal vigour and 
bounce and elasticity, has occurred. Keep your 
child at home from school, keep him from en- 
gaging in the more violent competitive plays, 
keep him out-of-doors, and, if possible, send him 
to the country for four, eight or twelve weeks 
after an attack of measles, of scarlet fever, of 
diphtheria, of whooping-cough, of mumps — yes, 
even of tonsilitis and of a severe cold, which is 
an infection like the others and probably per- 
manently damages as many kidneys, nervous 
systems and hearts as any one of them — and 
you will have taken a long step toward warding 
off the risk of a childhood of invalidism and of an 
early decay of his arteries or his nervous system. 
Give Nature all the time she wants and every 
possible advantage in the way of surroundings, 
so that she can make a complete and permanent 
cure, and you will have wiped out one of the com- 
monest causes of invalidism in later life. 

The same may be said in regard to the preven- 
tion and cure of most forms of crippling in childhood; 
in fact, one of the most cheering results of modern 
medicine is the extent to which, even in the slums 
of our largest cities, crippled, hunchbacked, club- 



3 2 4 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

footed, bow-legged children have almost disappeared. 
If medical science had done nothing else for human- 
ity this would have well repaid all the time and 
labour that have been expended upon it. It prac- 
tically has come to the point that there is no excuse 
for a child's being or remaining crippled or de- 
formed, save in a few of the rarest and severest 
congenital defects or after prolonged and desperate 
suppurating disease or crushing and maiming 
accidents. All cases of clubfoot, for instance, if 
taken in hand promptly and intelligently, may be 
cured so that the child has a thoroughly useful and 
in most cases a perfect foot; and this, too, often 
without even needing to use the knife. 

Nine tenths of all cases of hunchback are due to 
tuberculosis of the bones of the spinal column. 
Eight tenths of all cases of hip-joint disease and a 
large share of all crippling inflammations and 
abscesses in bones and joints all over the body are 
due to the same cause. Many cases of wasting 
diarrhoea — particularly those with a protuberant 
abdomen — and a large majority of suppurating 
glands, or "kernels," in the neck, throat and arm- 
pit, are due to either tubercle or the pus-forming 
germs of wound infections, besides many backward 
and wasting and under-nourished conditions in 
children, for which it is difficult to discover any 
positive cause. 

Wipe out the great white plague alone, as is 



THE DELICATE CHILD 325 

perfectly practicable, by preventing the spread 
of its contagion from advanced cases to others 
in the same household and family with them; 
send all children found or even suspected to be 
affected with it out into the country for a course 
in Nature's great hospital, the open air — and 
you will within a single generation have wiped 
out of existence all this pitiful army of cripples 
and hunchbacks and scarred and stunted and 
wasted children. 

When we further remember that from ten to 
thirty per cent, of all cases of blindness are due to one 
infectious disease, the contagion of which gets into 
the eyes of the child at birth; that another large 
share of the inmates of our blind asylums, and a 
still larger of those in schools for the deaf and 
dumb, are there on account of a preventable disease, 
cerebro-spinal meningitis; that a considerable pro- 
portion of the lamings and paralyses of childhood 
are due to another preventable infection for which 
science is just now beginning to find a cure, infantile 
paralysis — it can be seen what a tremendous 
amount of torturing disability and pitiful handi- 
cappings and cripplings of innocent children is 
going to be swept out of existence when science, 
with the assistance of an intelligent public, gets 
these infectious diseases under control. That day 
is already in sight, thanks to the patient, self- 
sacrificing, devoted labours of our world army 



326 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

of laboratory workers — the real working priests 
or lay brothers of the religion of the future. 

Another field of wondrous promise in the building 
up of weakly and delicate children is only just 
beginning to open up and can barely be touched 
upon here — that is, the succession of discoveries 
which we are steadily making as to the influence 
upon growth and health exercised by certain struc- 
tures of the body known as the ductless glands, 
from the fact that they have no open duct or dis- 
charge-tube emptying into any of the body cavities, 
but pass their secretions directly into the blood- 
vessels which surround them. One of the best 
known of these is the thyroid gland, which has 
already been found capable of transforming a 
certain form of dwarf idiot, known as a cretin 
and very common in certain mountainous districts 
of Europe and Asia, into a fairly intelligent, well- 
grown, self-supporting, useful and happy member 
of society. His condition is due to a disease of 
the thyroid gland which destroys its function, 
and may be overcome by feeding the unfortunate 
child with the dried extract of the thyroid gland 
of a sheep. 

Another ductless gland, the suprarenal gland, 
is just beginning to be understood and found to 
have a marked effect upon the development of the 
heart and bloodvessels, and also incidentally of 
the lungs and liver; and, in properly selected cases, 



THE DELICATE CHILD 327 

it acts as a powerful stimulus to development 
and a tonic to the proper action of these important 
organs. 

Last, and least understood of all, is a tiny little 
gland at the base and centre of the brain, directly 
above the top of the roof of the mouth, known 
as the pituitary body, whose over-development 
is found to produce — if occurring in young life — 
giantism or abnormal stature, which is, nine times 
out of ten, a diseased condition and not a desirable 
state at all — or, in later life, a singular and gro- 
tesque overgrowth of the hands, the feet, the jaws 
and the arches of bone over the eyes, known as 
acromegaly, which makes the unfortunate victim 
look like a caricature of his former self. 

The pituitary body is also correspondingly shrunk 
and atrophied in a large class of dwarfs. Though 
little is definitely settled in regard to it as yet, 
the pituitary is now beginning to be rated as a 
sort of growth-regulating centre for the entire 
body, a view that was suggested by the writer 
nearly fifteen years ago. Several investigators of 
high repute have expressed the hope that we shall 
be able, by the administration of its extract, to 
control certain abnormalities of growth and de- 
velopment, in a most helpful and interesting way. 

Far the most frequent trouble of the delicate 
child is inability to adjust himself automatically 
to average or ordinary surroundings. And by one 



328 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

of those unfortunate vicious circles which occa- 
sionally occur in our mental processes we are too 
apt to think that because the symptoms 
of this maladjustment are nervous, mental or 
temperamental, they must be combated by mental, 
moral or disciplinary measures. Our children 
literally ask bread and we give them a stone — 
argument, exhortation and " appeals to their better 
nature" — when what they really need is half 
an inch of butter on their bread and an hour's 
extra sleep in the morning. The less we treat 
the mental and emotional peculiarities of our 
children by mental and emotional means the better 
success we shall have in dealing with them. 

It should never be forgotten that childhood is, 
above all things, a period of storage of surplus, 
of charging the body batteries not merely for the 
day or the month but for the threescore years 
and ten that are to follow. All the processes of 
intake are and ought to be at their fullest and 
highest tide. It is hardly possible to induce a 
healthy child to take too much sound, rich, nour- 
ishing food or too much sleep. It is easily possible 
to let him undereat, or to let him stay awake too 
long, or overwork, or overplay. A growing child 
should have all the food, all the rest and all the 
sunshine and fresh air he can possibly utilize — 
and then some more to grow on and store up for 
future use. The young robin in the nest eats its 



THE DELICATE CHILD 329 

own weight of food in one summer day; whenever 
its beak is not wide agape it is asleep — and the 
human nestling is strikingly like unto it. Even 
to threescore years we do most of our growing 
while we are asleep; and are either eating or earning 
our meal tickets most of the time that we are awake. 

Of all the parts of the child's body which are 
growing — not only for the present but for the future 
as well — which are piling up capital in advance 
for lifelong use, the nervous system and the brain 
are the most forehanded. The child's brain at 
birth is already over one half its adult size and 
attains eight tenths of its full bulk by seven years 
of age. The only important way in which you can 
contribute to the vigour of a child's brain and the 
stability of his nervous system up to seven years 
of age is by feeding him; and the most important 
and vital way of developing his mind for the next 
seven years is by giving him full opportunity 
to exercise his senses and his muscles in play 
outdoors. 

What his ultimate mental stature will be is, 
like his bodily, Nature's affair — not ours. Here 
is where much of our trouble with the delicate 
child begins. We don't trust Nature. We have 
no patience with the slowness with which she is 
building up that large brain, that wondrously 
complex and sensitive nervous system or that 
vivid temperament. Because the child's mind 



33o WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

or nervous system shows already signs of unusually 
quick response we think here is a mind worth 
cultivating and forcing, and proceed to increase 
the already abnormal vigour of his mental vi- 
brations, without noticing that we are at the same 
time throwing his liver and digestion and muscles 
further out of gear. 

We are perpetually pulling up the child's nervous 
system by the roots to see if it is growing properly. 
We do everything to stimulate just that part of 
the child's nature that ought to be wet-blanketed 
and slowed down. The nervous system is abso- 
lute king of the body, in the sense that it will get 
the best of everything that is going; and there is 
not the slightest danger of overbuilding the body 
or overpampering the appetite or overencouraging 
the indolence of the delicate child who has a top- 
heavy brain. Everything that he eats will turn 
to brain. 

Our ideas of what we can do directly to promote 
brain growth and mental development are almost 
as absurd as the theory gravely advanced not half 
a century ago that a moderate degree of hydro- 
cephalus — "water on the brain" — in early child- 
hood was of advantage, because it expanded the 
bones of the skull and gave the brain room to 
grow — the only basis for the precious theory 
being that the heads in childhood of a certain 
number of exceptionally able and brilliant men 



THE DELICATE CHILD 331 

were so large, on account of their precociously 
developed brains, as to appear almost hydroce- 
phalic. 

The first requisites, then, for the building up of 
the delicate child are an abundance of food and an 
abundance of sleep, and I hardly know which of 
the two requirements to place first. There is 
no question that a large share of the success of 
our modern treatment of tuberculosis is due to the 
absolute rest insisted upon in the open air. In 
fact, food, open air and rest form the great trinity 
of factors in the cure. The nearer you can come 
to inducing a child to spend half of his time in 
sleep up to ten years of age, the better that child 
will grow; and this is doubly true of the delicate 
child. What he needs above all things is time for 
adjustment. He is one of the illustrations of Rous- 
seau's profound though erratic wisdom, when the 
philosopher declared that, in education and growth, 
"II est le temps qu' 'on perd qu'on gagne" — "It is 
the time that we lose which we gain." Have no 
fear but that your child will "arrive" ninety-nine 
times out of a hundred; give him all the time he 
wants. We admit, with owl-like approval, that we 
cannot put old heads on young shoulders; and yet 
that is precisely what two thirds of our mental 
and moral training of children attempts. The 
child's sleep, of course, should always be in the 
open air or in a breeze between open windows; 



332 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

and he should get at least five hours of sunlight 
every day, when this is available. 

The same general principles should apply in 
regard to his feeding. Don't be afraid to follow 
even his whims and his cravings — in the beginning 
at least — until you get him well started in the 
habit of wanting to devour things. Indeed, nine 
times out of ten these whims and fancies of his will 
be sounder than what has been shrewdly termed 
"that ponderous folly of the middle-aged which 
we call mature judgment." The larger his brain 
and the smaller his stomach, so to speak, the more 
concentrated will be the food that he demands. 
Many delicate children have a positive craving for 
butter. They will literally plaster it on their 
bread and eat, if allowed, a quarter of a pound a 
day; this the old regime sternly denied them, but 
offered them a tablespoonful a day of cod-liver oil 
or olive oil as a substitute! Let them have all 
the butter, all the cream and all the roasted almonds 
or pecans or English walnuts, in reason, that they 
want; let their bread be simply an excuse for butter 
and their mush for cream and sugar — and you will 
have started them on the first slope of the up- 
grade toward balance and vigour. Sugar is another 
real food and meat another; and, though both in 
excess may possibly have some undesirable after ef- 
fects in adults, these have been greatly exaggerated^ 
and the popular belief as to their unwholesomeness 



THE DELICATE CHILD 333 

for children is almost pure superstition and little 
more. Our habit of feeding children upon plain 
foods and inexpensive dishes is based on Puritanism 
and stinginess, equal parts. There are no cheap 
foods for children. 

All healthy, growing young animals ought to 
have an outward and visible surplus, as well as 
an internal one, in the shape of a coating of fat. 
This is the invariable rule in the animal kingdom 
— plumpness and roundness and comfortableness 
are the marks of growing young things — and it 
has comparatively few exceptions in our own 
species. Broadly speaking, the child that is not 
comfortably plump is not normal, in the sense 
of getting all his possibilities of growth and develop- 
ment, and needs usually to have more meat, fat 
and sugar in his diet, and more sleep. If a child 
gorges himself into an attack of indigestion when 
turned loose on candy or cakes and cream, or in 
the jam closet, it is simply a sign that his diet has 
not been properly balanced and his abnormal 
craving is a mark of sugar starvation. Balance his 
diet properly with plenty of sugar and sweet things, 
and he may be trusted with an open candy box 
and the key of the jam closet. 

If you once succeed in making your delicate 
child fat and plump, and know how to keep him 
so, you have solved three fourths of your problem; 
and time can be trusted to do the rest. 



334 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

Above all things, avoid stimulating, or indeed 
paying any attention to that part of the delicate 
child that is already overdeveloped — his mind, 
his nervous system and his emotions. These are 
the very last children in the world who ought to 
be subjected to appeals to their better nature, 
to their reason and to their sense of the fear of 
consequences, or of pride, or rivalry. Feed them 
all you can induce them to eat, turn them out to 
play in the dirt, put them to sleep in the open air, 
and let their minds and their consciences and 
their moral natures go hang. A mind of some 
sort and a morality of some sort are just as essen- 
tial to survival as a body, and will grow just as 
naturally and wholesomely from contact with en- 
vironment. Keep children healthy and happy, set 
them a good example, answer a tenth or more of 
their questions; and, like Little Bopeep's sheep, 
you can safely leave them alone — and they'll 
come home with their mental and moral tails be- 
hind them. 

With the exception of the fraction of a percen- 
tage, already alluded to, who are born mentally 
deficient or morally defective, ninety-nine per cent, 
of all perversities or queerness or little vices of 
children are things that they have either picked up 
from example or been driven into by fear. 

Keep fear as absolutely as possible out of the 
environment of not only the delicate but also 



THE DELICATE CHILD 335 

the healthy child. For the first seven years of 
his life in this age of peace and safety, there is abso- 
lutely nothing for him to be afraid of or which 
the fear reflex will enable him to avoid, save such 
crude and rare dangers as falls from a window, 
or being run over in the street, or setting himself 
on fire; and he should grow up as nearly as possible 
without knowing the name of fear. There are no 
bogies who will "git him ef he don't watch out. " 
There are no witches or demons, or things that 
lurk under the bed or in dark corners — there 
is not even an angry God, who has damned him 
in advance and whose accusing eye is relentlessly 
in every place; and it is little short of criminal to 
put such ideas as these into the minds of children, 
especially of those who are already of a nervous 
or emotional type. 

It is not only wrong but shameful to tell an 
innocent child that some little mistake he may 
have made, or petty offence he has committed 
against the laws of the household, is wicked; for, 
he is as innocent of moral ideas as a kitten and should 
be kept so as long as possible. Fear and the sense 
of wrongdoing, and that moral biliousness — con- 
viction of sin — will come soon enough; but let 
him at least start free and fearless and happy. 
Develop his sense of humour and repress and dis- 
courage abnormal conscientiousness of every sort. 
A diet even of Sunday Supplements will be whole- 



336 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

somer for the sensitive child than one of Sunday 
school books and Bible stories. 

One point of considerable practical importance, 
which often has to be considered in the care of 
the delicate or difficult child, is as to whether he 
needs a change of treatment or of scene and sur- 
roundings. Broadly considered, no environment 
has as yet been invented half so wholesome for a 
child as a good home. Very often, too, the changes 
that are needed to make that home ideal are changes 
in the personal attitude of the parents or other 
members of the family, which would be as whole- 
some and improving for them as for him. Occa- 
sionally a selfish father or nervous mother is the 
worst possible companion for the child, particularly 
because they both, so to speak, stick out at the 
same points and grate upon one another in pro- 
portion. On the other hand, such contact, if it 
can be kept within reasonable limits of friction, 
is the best possible education and discipline for both 
of them; and the education children give their 
parents is at least as important and valuable as 
that which parents give their children. 

Petulantly to give up the problem and cut the 
Gordian knot by sending the troublesome boy 
or nervous girl away to school is simply cowardly 
shirking and evasion of our sacred duty as parents. 

On the other hand, there is also the possibility, 
as Oliver Wendell Holmes humorously expressed 



THE DELICATE CHILD 337 

it, of "Smith smithing Smith into the insane asy- 
lum"; and an occasional change of air and a vacation 
from one another are excellent things for the mem- 
bers of even the most harmonious of families, from 
grandparents and grandchildren up to husbands 
and wives. 

A helpful compromise between a series of per- 
petual jarring and of throwing up the hands and 
turning the youngster over completely to some 
professional childfarmer is the summer camp, or 
vacation home, for both boys and girls. Here the 
youngster can be given a chance actually to live 
and put into practice his daydreams, with paddle 
and moccasin and eagle feathers, and become 
for the summer a healthy, happy, unworried and 
brainless young animal. He can also be brought 
wholesomely and naturally into contact with young- 
sters of his own age, closely enough to rub the 
corners off and take the nonsense out of him — 
and yet under sufficiently kindly and intelligent 
supervision to prevent the outgrowth of those 
brutal little habits and disgusting mummeries 
and false codes of morals that boys of a certain 
age, if torn out of their natural home surroundings 
and forced to herd together in dormitories and 
within bounds, are almost certain to develop. 
Then we say that these results of our absurd and 
artificial system are the natural tendencies of that 
dreadful young savage, a boy. His absence is 



338 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

just long enough to develop a good, healthy attack 
of homesickness and appreciation of his privileges 
and blessings in the family circle, and at the same 
time to give opportunity for the development of 
a similar mellowing process in the mental attitude 
of the members of his family at home toward him. 
When autumn comes he will be glad to get back 
and they will be glad to have him back; and both 
will be much more likely to do their best to get 
along with each other with the prospect of another 
pleasant vacation separation next year. 



CHAPTER XV 



FICTION AS A DIET 



TO THE serious-minded the value of fiction 
as a diet would seem about equivalent 
to that of froth as food. They will assure 
us that we might as well endeavour to grow fat 
by snuffing up the east wind, like the Scriptural 
wild ass of the desert, as to build up either mental 
or bodily power upon a diet of fiction. But some 
of the apparently most useless things in the world 
are the most necessary to life. We cannot eat 
froth or digest the air that its bubbles contain, 
but nearly half the bulk of our most important 
single food, bread, the Staff of Life, is composed 
of it. A loaf is a bubble of flour froth and owes 
much of its digestibility and wholesomeness to the 
spongy porous form which its gas content gives it. 
Plants cannot eat air, yet one of the principal 
aims of scientific tillage is to keep the soil bed well 
stirred up so as to be porous and full of air down 
to the very tips of the roots of the crop, so that 
chemical and bacterial changes, without which no 
plant can live, can take place freely. 

Food for the fancy may neither directly strengthen 

339 



340 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

the intellect nor enrich the memory, but neither 
of the latter can either grow or keep healthy with- 
out it, any more than other living things can without 
the sunshine and fresh air — those most ethereal 
and unsubstantial of things. 

It is often the trivial things that really matter. 
Man is emphatically made all in one piece: body, 
soul, and spirit, will, intellect, and imagination, 
and if you starve one of his demands, you cheat 
all. As porridge without salt, yes, as a gun without 
flint or percussion cap, would be life without im- 
agination. A dwarfed and starved imagination 
is almost as bad for the health and future efficiency 
of its possessor as a crooked spine. One of the 
gravest obstacles that we find in our hygienic 
campaigns is the difficulty of getting people to 
imagine and believe in the possibility of some 
improvement in the conditions which they have 
been accustomed to, and in the habits in which 
they have been bred. The causes of improvement 
in health and happiness are physical and material, 
enough, good food, better wages, pure water, pure 
air. But to get these the first and most practically 
fundamental task is to quicken popular imagination, 
make it capable of picturing something better and 
of realizing the faults of the present and the past. 
It has long been a classic lament of moralists that 
the two things which the mass of humanity was 
most determined to have, were panem et circenses 



FICTION AS A DIET 341 

(bread and games). And the fact that they will 
often put up with a pretty slender amount of 
doubtful quality of bread, if they could get plenty 
of games, has been shrewdly used for his own ad- 
vantage by the tyrant and exploiter in every age. 
But their instinct was perfectly sound. "Man 
cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that 
proceeded out of the mouth of God," certainly 
included legend and song and story and the drama 
and the pomp of great festivals and rejoicings, 
unless there be many things in this world which 
were not created by the Almighty. 

We have all heard and echoed mechanically 
that the imagination is the noblest gift of man, 
but we do not adequately realize what a tremen- 
dously vital, practical, fundamental part it plays 
in the welfare and progress of mankind. The 
moment you start to improve upon anything, 
you must use your imagination. Of course we 
recognize at once that the great inventor, the 
discoverer of some new and far-reaching truth, 
must have a "wonderful imagination"; but we do 
not see so clearly that no one can build a house or 
shoe a horse, or dig a ditch, or cook a dinner, or make 
a dress decently and creditably without using the 
imagination. The man who has no imagination is 
a failure as a craftsman; the woman who has no 
imagination makes a mess of her housekeeping sim- 
ply because no two tasks or no two conditions are 



342 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

ever precisely alike, and the one who clings mechani- 
cally to the old routine, the ancient rule of thumb 
without ability to see where it not only can, but 
must, be modified will score the largest and most 
serious percentage of failures in the long run. In 
the language of biology, he cannot adjust himself 
to his environment and hence cannot survive. 

One of the most extraordinary things about our 
amazing system of education is that, while it con- 
centrates its gravest and most ponderous attention 
upon the memory, the reason and the intellect, 
it leaves the cultivation of the imagination largely 
to chance. The stories which the child hears in 
the home and on the streets, the romantic and 
highly improbable accounts of his own adventures 
which he constructs and recites to his fellows, the 
dime novels and the penny-dreadful, the stories 
of Indians and pirates and detectives that he 
smuggles into his desk and under his pillow — 
these are the only food which the worshippers of the 
Three R's provide for the development of his noblest 
faculty. What wonder that he gulps them down 
with ravenous indiscrimination as a thirsty child 
would muddy water, or a starving one half-cooked 
food. The very eagerness of his craving for fiction 
shows its vital importance to him. The greatest 
possible service of education, and one which it 
practically does not perform at present, is to train 
a child to grasp and master a situation and adjust 



FICTION AS A DIET 343 

himself to it. But he cannot possibly do this with- 
out a constructive use of his imagination. Any 
food however coarse or rank which will start him 
to thinking for himself, to imagine new possibilities, 
to dream of better things will do him a more price- 
less service than any amount of mechanical drilling 
or cramming of his memory. Information, no 
matter how useful or important, is of no value 
until it has been digested, and the only faculty 
of the mind which contains any pepsin is the 
imagination. 

From the point of view of bodily health as well 
as mental efficiency, you might as well let your 
liver go to sleep as your imagination. Only get 
a child or a man to read and enjoy reading, and 
form the habit of it, and you have taken the 
longest single step toward leading him to think 
and to act for himself. This is why the powers 
that be, whether temporal or ecclesiastic, have 
usually opposed education save when they could 
turn it into channels which would be harmless 
to themselves and have always opposed the printing 
press and the newspaper because they never could 
control them. Not a little of the still surviving 
denunciation of "trashy fiction," and the "sen- 
sational press" is a survivor of this attitude of mind. 
It makes comparatively little difference what a 
child or a class reads to begin with; the main thing 
is to form the habit, and his instincts can be trusted 



344 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

steadily to lead him to something better. A stolid, 
impenetrable, pachydermatous imagination is the 
greatest foe of progress and enemy of human wel- 
fare. Any means which cultivates and stimulates 
it within reasonable limits will cultivate and en- 
large every other faculty of the human mind and 
body as well. 

Give a man a lively imagination and a keen 
sense of humour and you have provided him with 
the best possible antidote against mental dry-rot 
and its second cousins, indolence and prejudice. 
A stunted, diseased imagination is the mother 
of delusions; and the best cure for them is not 
merely more intelligence, but a broader and more 
powerful imagination. A sound and vigorous imagi- 
nation, instead of proving a cause of rash action 
and unsound judgment, is one of the best possible 
mental balance-wheels. The child or the man 
with a dwarfed imagination is robbed of one of 
his most priceless birthrights. It is of course a 
truism that it is the only creative faculty of the 
mind and the one whose exercise gives us the greatest 
and the purest pleasure. Food for the imagination 
is just as necessary as food for the intellect or food 
for the stomach. No man whose imagination is 
warped is going to live healthfully and happily, 
either mentally, physically or morally. 

It is not a question of whether we will feed this 
faculty of ours or not, but simply on what and 



FICTION AS A DIET * 345 

how it will feed itself, and if it cannot get wholesome 
food it will eat garbage. But primarily and fun- 
damentally it prefers sound food, and nothing 
but the absence of it will drive it to devour trash 
and offal. 

Happily in childhood Nature provides food for 
the imagination in such profusion that all our stu- 
pidity and perversity can scarcely succeed in 
starving the flame. The glory in the grass, the 
wonder in the flower, the light that never was on 
sea or land, touches and gilds the smallest and 
commonest of everyday things about us. No 
matter whether the things themselves are attractive, 
or even useful or not, their mere existence is gilded 
by the magic of our childish vision until it becomes 
a source of pleasure in itself. As Stevenson, with 
that wondrous insight into the very heart of the 
child mind, sang: 

The world is so full of a number of things, 
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. 

And, heaven be praised, we are unless some 
"grown-up" positively goes out of his way, whether 
by endeavour or neglect, or scarcely less often 
by well-meant interference and instruction, to pre- 
vent it! His delight in myth and legend and fairy 
tale, which is just beginning to be recognized even 
by educators is nature's royal road to learning, 
wondrous romances which he will construct either 



346 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

of his own adventures, presumably in some previous 
incarnation, or of the habits and doings of some 
imaginary friends and playmates of his who come 
to him in the dusk! His vivid transformation of a 
walking-stick into a prancing charger, of a couple 
of chairs on the nursery floor into the Flying Dutch- 
man, and fat old Fido into any kind of ravenous 
beast required by the artistic necessities of the 
situation, from a Jabberwock to a "pole bearer," 
all show his power of developing his highest single 
faculty — that of putting two things together and 
out of them creating a new and different third. 

Even here his unspoiled taste is sound. He 
would rather have stories of birds and butterflies 
and flowers and grass and trees, of sun and wind 
than stories of ghosts and demons and gods and 
goddesses. Give him plenty of happy, breezy, 
wholesome and intrinsically true stories of the 
living world about him, and he will not crave, 
in fact will be positively repelled by, those morbid 
echoes of jealousy, murder and lust which play so 
large a part in myth and legend and folk-story 
and Old Testament story. 

While many of these myths and legends are of 
the keenest interest and enjoyment to the child, 
I frankly confess that I cannot help feeling that 
their indiscriminate use can easily become a source 
of harm and that they should be most carefully 
selected and modernized for the use of the child. 



FICTION AS A DIET 347 

Most of them are tinged with that profound melan- 
choly of the earlier ages of mankind which still 
exists in savages. Man is but a pigmy and the 
sport of swarms of higher powers, some friendly 
but more of them malignant, all mischievous and 
uncertain. The one secret of success, the highest 
achievement, is not boldly to face and conquer 
Fate, but to cringe before her, to secure the 
favour of some god by some act however dis- 
reputable, or dishonourable, to get control of some 
word of power, some trick, some magical secret, 
some invincible sword. The game of life is never 
to be played openly, but always with loaded dice, 
and the man or woman who succeeds is the «one 
who is most craftily successful in winning the 
favour of the most powerful of the generally dis- 
reputable powers that be, whether God, Djinn, 
or Wizard. A. large minority of these myths and 
stories, whether Greek, Norse or Hebrew, are unfit 
to be told to a clean-minded child, and another 
considerable percentage of them are so utterly 
unjust and unfair as to shock his native sense 
of right and justice. The story of Hector and 
Achilles for instance, of Esau and Jacob, or of 
Baldur and Loki take an immense amount of de- 
cidedly sophisticated explanation and befogging 
before he can be induced to regard them as fair or 
even decent. 

I can conceive of no better means of riveting 



348 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

in his mind the firm conviction that trickery will 
always vanquish honesty, favouritism conquer merit, 
and error be stronger than truth than an indiscrimi- 
nate course of these tales and stories. 

But when the magic carpet of reading is placed 
at his command, his immediate surroundings become 
too limited, too prosaic, and he begins to fly hither 
and thither, sitting cross-legged upon it to the 
uppermost parts of the earth; he sails the Spanish 
Main, leaps over reeking bulwarks and steps over 
stones slippery with blood, with his bosom friends 
and ideals, the pirates. 

They are not usually men "of much moral 
principle," as Mr. A. Ward apologetically remarks, 
but they are not a pin worse, even in the yellowest of 
the yellow-backs, than the gentlemen adventurers 
of the sixteenth century, and they are three whole 
grades in the rogue's gallery above any god or 
goddess yet invented. The same is true of the 
Boy Outlaw and the Terror of the Everglades. 
The heart of these swashbuckling heroes is always 
in the right place, even if their heads and heels 
indulge in some strange capers. The desperado 
who is the bravest, the most generous, the most 
faithful to his friends and most magnanimous to 
his enemies, the most chivalrous to women and the 
kindest to the poor is the one who emerges trium- 
phant in the long run, eight times out of ten. 

No less romantic and less vivid are the imaginings 



FICTION AS A DIET 349 

of the mind of the girl, but her fancy takes a gentler 
and softer turn. The dignities and delights of 
housekeeping and of home making, the care of 
wondrously beautiful and brilliant children, the 
charm of diamonds and silk dresses and beautiful 
carriages and princely romances. Later the dis- 
covery, the wondrous revelation of the prince 
beautiful, with the raven locks and the marble 
brow and the soulful, piercing eyes. He will 
probably have a snub nose and freckles and hair 
like a shoe-brush when he comes, but he will be the 
prince beautiful just the same. It is not too much 
to say that a boy's ideals, his standards, his notions 
of what success really consists in and what is best 
worth while, his attitude toward women, his attitude 
toward the nation and the race is as largely moulded 
and determined by the fiction that he reads and 
delights in as by any other single factor. 

The same is equally true of the girl and her ideals. 
They both will dream dreams and build castles in 
the air, and construct their ideals out of some sort 
of material. The question is, What kind of raw 
material are you furnishing for the fabric of these 
visions? or are you letting them go out into the high- 
ways and hedges and glean for themselves? It is 
as cruel and as injurious to deprive a growing 
boy or a budding girl of an abundance of sound, 
wholesome, enjoyable fiction as it is to debar them 
from butter on their bread and sugar on their 



35© WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

porridge. It is best, of course, to provide this 
supply of imagination food from real life. 
There are plenty of real flesh and blood heroes 
both in the past and round about us in the present, 
much superior to any demigod or saint, but just 
as the great artist does not merely hold the mirror 
up to nature, but holds it in such a way as to make 
his picture not only literal truth but the emblem 
of the eternal verities as well, so the gifted word 
painter can draw a figure or tell a story which 
in the strictest sense is truer even and more con- 
vincing than the precisest and most strictly accurate 
recital of any single individual fact. 

We love the characters in the novel as we seldom 
do people in real life, because the artist lias enabled 
us to recognize in them the eternal and never- 
dying triumphs and failures, loves and hates, hopes 
and fears of humanity. This is why, while we are 
often fearfully bored by even our best friends, 
if we see too much of them, we never lose interest 
in Colonel Newcombe, Tristram Shandy, Jeanie 
Deans, *Mr. Pickwick, Leather Stocking, Sir John 
Falstaff and Becky Sharp. 

In the early days when reading and writing 
were gifts to marvel at, this love of the adventure, 
of the new, of the more beautiful, finding, alas! 
often too little to feed upon in its immediate sur- 
roundings, could be gratified only through the arts 
of the story teller, the minnesinger and the bard. 



FICTION AS A DIET 351 

And there is no more lucrative, influential pro- 
fession, over something like two thirds of the earth's 
surface still to-day, than that of the man who has 
the gift of living and convincing story telling. 

As the story teller began to heighten his effects 
first by intonation and by gesture — pantomime 
— the calling in of the accessories for dialogue and 
combat, the use of backgrounds, costumes and scenic 
effects, the second great food of the imagination, 
the drama, developed. This still holds, and de- 
servedly, all over the face of the earth in every 
possible stage of culture and civilization, a high and 
unshakable place in the affection and the regard 
of the human race. For vigour of appeal, for elec- 
tric stimulation and vivifying of the emotions and 
fancy, it still holds the highest place. Bold and 
even at times shameless as it is in depicting life 
exactly as it exists, and from all possible points of 
view with both the varnish left off and the cant 
left out, the net result of its influence is over- 
whelmingly stimulating, invigorating and elevating. 
It makes men and women think and feel with 
others and for others in spite of themselves. It 
develops sympathy and helpfulness, it takes the 
individual out of himself and the rut in which 
he is living; it enables him to see, above the smoke 
and grime of the market place, the beauty of the 
great fiery virtues — courage, devotion, honour, 
vitality, friendship and patriotism. 



352 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

While some of its displays of vice and headstrong 
passion and lawlessness are temporarily attractive, 
and its allusions to gilded frailties too suggestive 
and apologetic at times, its ultimate ethics are 
overwhelmingly sound and its morality, indeed, 
abjectly and almost absurdly Sunday-school-like in 
its propriety and conventionality. Its villain may 
be an accomplished person of wondrous address with 
sword, or pistol, or tongue, or all three, and may in 
the first and second acts triumph over and inflict 
all sorts of bodily and mental agonies upon his 
innocent victims, but he is hall-marked from the 
moment of his entry by his scowl, or his sneer. 
His villainy is so plainly stamped all over him 
that anywhere, outside of stage-land, he would be 
arrested at sight, or mobbed on the street; he is 
hissed by the gallery at his every appearance, and 
he is nine times out of ten utterly foiled or 
confounded in the long run and driven out into 
the darkness of an undying remorse, if he escapes 
being perforated, split, or blown up on the spot. 
The impossibly noble and pulp-headed hero and 
the incredibly virtuous and brainless heroine tri- 
umph victoriously in the end, their virtue alone, 
by sheer mass play, being able to overcome the 
obvious defects in their intelligences. The net 
influence of the stage has been overwhelmingly 
moral and wholesome, ever since it got rid of gods 
and goddesses with their injustices, their petty 



FICTION AS A DIET 353 

jealousies and perpetual interference in affairs as 
dramatis persona?. 

But the stage, vivid and stimulating as it was, still 
was lacking in breadth and universality of appeal, 
and in pure and unspoiled human interest. No 
theatre or amphitheatre, however large, will contain 
at one time more than a few thousands of the popu- 
lation of the nation or government by which it is 
supported; no drama or spectacle, however fre- 
quently repeated, could hope to be witnessed by 
and to reach more than a small per cent, of the 
people. It remained for the invention of man's 
greatest instrument of triumph over ignorance, 
prejudice, conservatism and injustice — ■ the printing 
press — to render possible the highest, fairest and 
most democratic means for the cultivation of the 
imagination — the novel. 

The novel is nothing more than the story turned 
in 10 visible form by the black magic of the printer's 
art and spread before the eyes of tens of thousands 
of readers in place of recited by word of mouth 
in the hearing of tens or scores; or the drama, 
spread upon the printed page, and witnessed in 
the stage setting of their own minds by millions of 
readers, instead of hundreds of spectators. But 
there is a difference and a striking one. The novel 
has risen to a distinctly higher plane and clearer 
atmosphere than the story or drama, by improving 
the justice and the life truthfulness of its con- 



354 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

ventions, by making the rules of the game fairer 
and more humane. It has got rid of at least two 
hampering and indeed demoralizing postulates and 
influences, the hereditary hero and the patron 
god or goddess. 

A large percentage of even the most deathless 
legends and stories of the heroic age are absolutely 
repulsive to our modern sense of fairness and de- 
cency. What would we think of a soldier of to-day 
who would rush into battle and perform prodigies 
of valour and skill upon his foes, knowing himself 
to be in some magic armour which was both bullet- 
proof and sword-proof, like Achilles at the Siege 
of Troy? To our modern eye, Achilles, far from 
being a hero, is a sulky, ill-conditioned cur and 
richly deserved the disgraceful and ignominious 
fate which he inflicted upon the modest, brave, 
loving and manly Hector. Achilles was infinitely 
the smaller man of the two physically, mentally 
and morally, but happened to be the favourite of 
the powers higher up and Hector didn't; hence the 
inevitable result. In the whole of the "Iliads" 
and "Odysseys" there is scarcely a single hero who 
stands fairly and squarely upon his own merits. 
He is simply a puppet in the hands of some spiteful 
goddess or disreputable god, and the one who has 
the strongest heavenly backer is the one who carries 
off the prize. At every stage in the story our in- 
terest is broken, our sense of fair play and decency 



FICTION AS A DIET 355 

outraged by the interference of some contemptible 
Olympian, throwing a net of invisible cords over 
the head of one hero, so that his brave adversary 
could hammer him to death with perfect safety, 
swooping down in the form of an eagle upon the 
helmet of one real man who happened to get into 
the book, and picking at his eyes and blinding him 
with its wings in order to keep him from chastising, 
as he richly deserved, the cowardly pet of the god- 
dess. The moment a god comes into the story, 
the human interest is broken and usually half the 
properties and the decencies as well. 

Man's gods are usually worse than himself and 
the embodiment of his vices rather than his virtues. 
If any personage or power, however exalted, at- 
tempted to employ on the field of battle or even in 
a football game or a baseball match, or a prize 
fight, one tenth of the interference, the unfairness, 
trickery and favouritism which the gods of all 
the heroic legends habitually exercised and employed, 
they would be fairly swept out of existence by a 
storm of popular indignation and contempt. Such 
tricks are still resorted to, such interference prac- 
tised in the lower world of business and politics, 
but it is the most wholesome sign of the times that 
they will no longer be tolerated in the purer 
atmosphere of the ideal world of the drama and the 
novel. Nor in that realm of human activity, man- 
aged by real men, war and athletic sports. 



356 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

There are three great foods for the growth and 
fields for the training of the imagination: the story, 
whether spoken or sung, the drama and the novel. 
"These three, and the greatest of these is" the novel. 
It is the best food for fancy ever invented — the 
sanest, the most wholesome, the most accessible. 
The ethics and the morale of the prize ring are 
superior to those of the stock exchange and the 
convention. In the novel all the favouritism and 
injustice of the legends and classic plays are changed; 
its characters are men and women of flesh and blood 
like ourselves. They start fairly and squarely 
from the scratch in the race, the game begins with 
all the cards on the table, face upmost. There are 
differences, of course, of station, of birth, of financial 
condition, of bodily and mental gifts among them; 
but these in all real literature are carefully stated 
and explained, so that the players are accurately 
handicapped by them and carry weight accordingly. 
The fact is brought out that every peculiarity has 
its compensation; every disadvantage, its corres- 
ponding advantage, and the two starters in the race 
are given places of advantage or disadvantage ac- 
cording to previous accomplisments; the two contest- 
ants for the love of the fair lady are weighed into the 
ring at as nearly as possible at the same avoirdu- 
pois. The manly beauty and vigour of the unspoiled 
child of the people are offset by the wealth and cun- 
ning of the dissipated slip of gentility who is his rival. 



FICTION AS A DIET 357 

The game is played out under the open skies, 
man against man and woman against woman. 
The villain is not all black or the hero all white. 
Each has the defects of his virtues and each re- 
ceives in the main, the legitimate returns upon 
such intelligence, courage and sincerity as he may 
possess. The conqueror does not throw him to 
the vultures afterward and sell his wife and children 
into slavery. Everything is done with fairness 
and decency and humanity. But the interest is 
not a whit less intense and absorbing, rather indeed 
the greater, because you recognize that it is a clean 
and honourable fight to the finish according to 
decent and well recognized rules, without favouri- 
tism, or interference from the gods or the fates, 
except in so far as they may have granted different 
hereditary endowments to the contestants. It 
is the spirit of the game that charms and holds you, 
not the ultimate result, but the feeling that you 
have witnessed a clean, genuine contest of skill 
and strength in which both have put forth their 
utmost powers, and both had a fair chance. No 
one would pay a penny to go and see the Podunck 
high school nine beaten by the Giants, or any 
other favourite of the gods; or any game in which 
there was a suspicion of a "frame up," but would 
cheerfully put down his last dollar to see a real 
fight for the championship between the Cubs and 
the Pirates. 



358 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

The novel has developed advantages over the 
drama in duration of interest and wholesome- 
ness in so far as it has got away from the His- 
torical Personage and the foregone conclusion. 
Whenever a king or a general or a great states- 
man is introduced into a story, the tendency is 
almost irresistible to magnify him so as to dwarf 
all the other characters. Whatever he particu- 
larly wants, it is more or less preordained that he 
must have. And while certain liberties may be 
taken, with relatively minor incidents in his career, 
such as the ladies that he falls in love with, or the 
games of golf that he plays, yet in the main the 
majority of his adventures must conform to the 
rigid and unescapable facts of history. You cannot 
possibly send him to exile or degrade him to ob- 
scurity whenever the dramatic interests of the story 
demand it, as you could an imaginary character. 
The historical play and the historical novel alike 
are almost compelled to concern themselves either 
with comparatively trivial escapades in the life and 
prospects of a great person, or introduce him pon- 
derously from time to time as a huge and cumbrous 
lay figure upon the stage and make the interest 
centre in the doing and adventures of the lesser 
personages of the story. 

The modern novel then, whether the shilling 
shocker or the six-shilling three-decker, has many 
claims to be regarded as the broadest and most 



FICTION AS A DIET 359 

democratic field and means for the cultivation of 
the highest powers of man that the world has yet 
seen. So far from making a man or a woman 
shallow and frivolous and frothy, it broadens his 
horizon, it deepens his sympathies, it kindles his 
imagination, it shows him the defects of the 
present, and the possible beauties and triumphs 
of the future. An abundance of novels are in 
our mental diet what plenty of fruit and fresh 
vegetables are in our physical one, not merely 
a source of legitimate and wholesome enjoyment, 
but most necessary to life, health and progress. 
They are the best and most accessible means of 
lifting us out of ourselves and the rut we have got 
into, calling away the blood from the overworked 
and overdriven areas of our brain and sending 
it coursing through the starved and under-exercised 
ones. Once we come under their magic spell, 
we have thrown off the livery and the bondage 
of our trade and our occupation and become just 
men and women again, living the life, thrilling 
with the joy, pulsating with the passions of the whole 
race. Pure, sound fiction does not need to have a 
moral or be instructive or conceal a sermon, but 
just to be a first-class story, keeping to the rules of 
the game, as wholesome for the mind and morals 
as sunshine is for the body. 

The most restful thing for a tired brain and 
overw T rought nervous system is, first a brisk, en- 



3 6o WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

joyable walk or a keen, eager game in the open 
air followed by a hundred pages or so of a good 
novel. You will sleep better, go back to your work 
next day fresher and better rested than if you 
had endeavoured to crowd your brain with ad- 
ditional information or instruction for practical 
use in your life work. Many stories, of course, 
of real life, of adventure, biography, of travel, 
of the newest achievements and discoveries in the 
wonder world of science, are as interesting, as 
fascinating and, in moderate doses, as refreshing 
as a novel or a good story; but most of them, how- 
ever keen their interest and fascinating their appeal, 
are still adding additional fatigue poisons to the 
store already in your blood, while the novel is prac- 
tically doing nothing but washing these out of the 
overworked areas of your brain. The very "brain- 
lessness" of the novel is one of its greatest 
advantages, the fact that it can be read without 
effort, almost without recognition, that it carries 
you along on its flowing stream like a dead leaf 
on a river, is one of its strongest points from the 
point of view of health. If men oftener read until 
they forgot their troubles, there would not be half 
as much drinking for the same purpose. I regard 
it as one of the most useful rules of mental health 
to keep on hand constantly at least one good novel, 
no matter who it is by, or what it is about, so long 
as it tells a good story and paints things as they 



FICTION AS A DIET 361 

really are. And at least once a day, preferably 
just before going to bed at night, plunge into it 
long enough to forget yourself and be unwilling 
to stop. It will make your sleep sounder, your 
brain clearer and your temper sweeter and saner 
than almost any other form of mental exercise 
that I know. 

If you are tired a good novel will rest you; if 
you are worried, it will make you forget your worries 
and yourself; if you are sick, it is one of your best 
medicines. The man or woman who, in the sunset 
afterglow of life, can enjoy a good story has found 
the secret of perpetual youth. 



CHAPTER XVI 

OVERWORKED CHILDREN ON THE FARM AND IN THE 

SCHOOL 

CHILD labour is as old as civilization. In- 
deed, in all but name, it is far older than 
civilization, for the child of the savage has 
to forage for himself and fight for his own food from 
the time he is able to crawl. In savagery, the child 
works for himself; in barbarism, for his parents; in 
civilization, for a factory. He simply changes 
taskmasters with the ages, and the sternest and 
most cruel of all was the first. More children 
die of starvation, disease, and neglect in the healthiest 
tribe of "noble savages" that now exists, than in 
the vilest slum of our factory towns under civili- 
zation. There is abundant ground for being 
ashamed of ourselves, little or none for discourage- 
ment or fear that the stamina of the race is being 
undermined, or its continued existence threatened 
by child labour. The race is not deteriorating, even 
the child of the factory slums is one and one half 
inches taller and seven pounds heavier than he was 
thirty years ago. So far as data are available, it 
seems almost certain that there never was, in any 

362 



OVERWORKED CHILDREN 363 

previous age of the world, as little harmful child 
labour as in the present one. The magnificent and 
beneficent series of laws and regulations forbidding 
harmful child labour which have been placed upon 
the statute books of all civilized countries and states 
are simply a living demonstration of an awakened 
public conscience upon this subject which did not 
exist before. The evil was present in abundance, 
but so diffused as to make no pointed appeal 
to public sentiment, and so universal that it was 
accepted as a matter of course. 

It is gravely to be doubted whether the invention 
of machinery and consequent development of the 
factory system, making the labour of children more 
valuable, since brute strength was no longer re- 
quired, upon the whole increased either the amount 
or the harmfulness of child labour. It simply 
concentrated, and, so to speak, advertised, its evil 
consequences, just as the poverty, malnutrition, 
dirt, and disease of a hundred thousand peasants 
and agricultural labourers when scattered out over a 
whole country-side or province escape our obser- 
vation, but horrify us when they are concentrated 
into four or five acres of a city slum. When chil- 
dren are overworked by the score and by the hun- 
dred in factories, in full view of the public, so that 
streams of their pale faces and stunted forms may be 
seen pouring out upon the open street, it is only a 
question of time when the public conscience will 



364 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

be awakened and the shame forbidden by law. So 
marked has been this effect that although there is 
yet abundant room for improvement, taking the 
civilized world as a whole, the child in the factory, 
shop, mine and mill is now carefully and fairly 
efficiently protected by wise, thoughtful and hu- 
mane laws, leaving as the only unprotected classes 
the children upon the farm and in the school. To 
what extent they need protection, not by law, but 
by the education of public sentiment, is the prob- 
lem of this chapter. 

Our Child Labour organizations have been so 
gratifyingly successful in their efforts for legislative 
reform that I believe the time has come for them to 
turn their attention in this direction as well. The 
relative magnitude of the problem is easily indi- 
cated by a few rough figures. According to the last 
United States census there were, of children under 
sixteen years of age in the United States, 650,000 
employed in gainful occupations in factory, shop, 
mill, etc.; 1,100,000 working for wages upon farms; 
and roughly, 15,000,000 in schools. It is easily seen 
where the greatest possible menace to the future of 
the race might fall. If only one per cent, of the 
children in schools were overworked or overconfined ; 
if only five percent, of the children employed upon 
farms, including those working at home, were so in- 
jured, it would work more injury to the nation than 
if twenty per cent, of those employed in shops and 



OVERWORKED CHILDREN 365 

factories were overworked. Or to put it differently : 
If all the children employed in shops, factories, and 
mines were injuriously overworked, that would only 
be the equivalent of the damage done if ten 
per cent, of the children upon our farms and five 
per cent, of those in our schools were overworked or 
overconfined. 

That overworking and underfeeding of children 
upon the farm and overworking and overconfining 
of children in the school exist, and in no insignificant 
numbers, few of experience will deny. Most of us 
who were born or have lived in the country will have 
little hesitation in testifying that at least ten and 
probably nearly twenty per cent, of children upon 
farms are overworked and underfed,from land hunger, 
traditional ideas of economy, Puritanic notions about 
discipline and "hardening" and "bearing the )*oke 
in one's youth," or from sheer ignorance and in- 
difference. While there are many admirable and 
wholesome features about life on a farm, so that it 
is probably, all things considered, the most whole- 
some and desirable place for children to grow up, 
it has also its defects. 

Those of us who happen to have been born or 
raised upon a farm, a real farm, run to earn a living 
and not as a healthful and very expensive amuse- 
ment, can promptly and feelingly testify that it is 
not half so rose-coloured as it is usually pictured in 
literature or through the pearly mists of our boyhood 



366 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

memories. Farm work is the hardest and most 
disagreeable work there is, with the longest hours and 
the poorest pay. Much of it has to be done before 
daylight or after dark in mud, in snow, in storm and 
slush. Farm bedrooms are cold and badly ventilated, 
and the sheer discomfort, verging at times upon 
agony, of getting out of bed on a winter's morning 
and starting the fire with damp wood in a kitchen 
that feels like a cold storage plant in January, and 
then going out to thaw the pump, shovel a path 
to the barn, feed the shivering, staring-coated horses, 
and milk half a dozen frost-rimed cows, is still fresh 
in our memories. These and a score of similarly 
cheerful and agreeable memories rise before us like 
a nightmare. It makes little difference where we 
may have gone, or what our lot in life, we never 
have had to do anything so disagreeable since. 
Moreover, while there is an abundance of food grow- 
ing upon the farm, that food is raised for sale, and 
wherever the balance is a narrow one between the 
income and expenditure, as it is in most of farmers' 
families, the bulk and the best of that food that will 
bring a good price in the market is and -must be 
sold, leaving only the poorer quality for home use. 
In short, the farmer who farms for a living, or who 
expects to make money, must, in the terse language 
of the corner grocery, "do all his own work, and live 
on what he can't sell." 

This stern necessity reacts upon the children of the 



OVERWORKED CHILDREN 367 

farm just as it does upon those of the factory town, 
and the physician in country practice can show you 
in the remotest and most peaceful country district 
as severe cases of malnutrition, of rickets, of anemia, 
of diseases of the joints and the spine, and of stunted 
development as you can find in a city hospital. 
There will not be so many of them, but they will be 
there, nevertheless, except in unusually prosperous 
and well-to-do neighbourhoods. In the aggregate, 
I think it would be safe to say that they equal, if 
they do not far exceed, the defectives and the de- 
generates of our much smaller slum population. 
Unquestionably, a large majority of the work done 
by children upon the farm, being for the most part 
in the open air, and under the care and protection of 
their own parents or relatives, is not only not harm- 
ful but decidedly beneficial; but we must not shut 
our eyes to the fact that young children and boys 
and girls are overworked upon farms, badly fed, and 
deprived of proper amusement and social and in- 
tellectual opportunities to a most undesirable degree, 
and that this is one of the most potent reasons for 
the oft-deplored exodus from the farm to the city. 
When it comes to overworking and underfeeding 
his children, making home hateful and life one 
joyless, monotonous grind, a certain class of farmer 
has no right to throw stones at any factory oper- 
ative, miner, or even sweat-shop worker. If Mr. 
Roosevelt's commission on country life will succeed 



368 WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

in reforming or even improving this type of man — 
you all know him, whose barn is four times as big 
as his house, and his real pets and prides his horses 
and pigs — it will do as much good as any factory 
legislation that can be placed upon the statute books. 
What of the alternative to child labour, the place 
to which the child must be sent if he be taken 
out of the factory — the school. As things stand 
at present, it is my unwilling judgment that while 
the factory may become a sweat shop, the average 
school in the United States to-day is little better 
than a mental treadmill for the average boy of the 
working classes after twelve years of age; that the 
education is so purely formal, so bookish, so lady- 
like, so irrational and impractical in a word, that it 
stunts his mind, bewilders his senses and fills him 
with a dislike for real education and training which 
warps him mentally as badly as the factory does 
physically. Many a boy of this class and age, as 
our antiquated curriculum stands at present, is 
better off working six hours a day in a well-ventilated, 
thoroughly sanitary workshop, conducted on kindly 
and intelligent principles, than he would be in the 
schoolroom droning and day-dreaming over classical 
absurdities, in which he can find no interest nor profit. 
The motto of the school is, "By books ye are saved. " 
But it is a case of "the letter that killeth." In 
the total, the school is probably doing more physical 
damage to our children than the factory. 



OVERWORKED CHILDREN 369 

What the boy wants is not books but life, not 
words but things, and as matters are arranged at 
present, he has to leave the schoolroom and go into 
the factory or the shop to get them. The average 
schoolroom is preferable to the shop or factory for 
the working boy or girl after the thirteenth year 
in but little more than the fact that it protects 
him from physical overstrain, and its deadening 
six-hour confinement at hard and uninteresting tasks 
is a heavy offset to this. 

Not only so, but the school curriculum's utter 
lack of appeal to the working boy of thirteen or 
more is one of the principal causes of the rush of 
child labour into the shop and the factory. Taking 
it the world over, the principal cause of harm- 
ful child labour is poverty; the stern need of even 
the pittance that can be earned by the child to 
enable the rest of the family to live, not unmixed 
with greed on the part of a certain class of parents, 
eager to recoup themselves for the expense and 
trouble of rearing a large family. In European 
countries the value of the child's earnings to the 
parents is the principal motive for early work. In 
this country, however, we are more fortunately situ- 
ated. Wages are higher, so that the father's income is 
more often or more nearly adequate to support the 
entire family, and the average of intelligence and 
humanity in the parents of the working class is 
much higher, so that they can see the advantage 



37© WE AND OUR CHILDREN 

of giving their children the best possible start in 
life. 

Statistical investigations of this point appear to 
have been made only upon a very limited scale. But 
so far as they have gone they bring out the interest- 
ing fact that from fifty to seventy per cent, of the 
child labour at too early years is due to the initiative 
not of the parent but of the child. The causes 
alleged by the children for their choice were most 
suggestive; while many of them simply wanted to 
earn money, to have more to spend, to get on in the 
world, to buy better clothes, or went to work just 
because their friends and comrades did, the largest 
single group gave it as their reason that they were 
tired of school, that they could not get on at school, 
that they could not understand their studies, or even, 
horrible dictu, that they got sick at school — they 
seem to stand confinement of the shop better than 
that of the schoolroom. In many of these cases 
the parents were not only perfectly willing for their 
children to continue at school, but were paying out 
money for instruction in bookkeeping, shorthand, 
music, drawing, etc., in addition to letting the 
children keep their wages. In short, the conclusion, 
strange as it may seem to many, is almost inevitable 
that if we would rationalize and modernize the cur- 
riculum of our public schools we should cut the 
foundation from under half if not two thirds of the 
child labour tendency. In fine, as- our most intelli- 



OVERWORKED CHILDREN 371 

gent teachers, our most thoughtful students of 
pedagogy, our physicians, our sanitarians, our child- 
labour students, have united for years in declaring, 
the most vital, the most crying demand before the 
American Commonwealth to-day is to make our 
public schools educate the whole child, and not merely 
the expanded bulb at the upper end of him. Train 
him physically and emotionally as well as mentally. 
Substitute the playground, the garden, the shop for 
the book-school. Fit him for life and for action 
instead of for contemplation and culture; for service 
instead of superiority; for work, not for display. 



THE END 



DEC 7 1911 



0ne copy del. to Cat. Div. 



DEC t 






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